When it was announced that The Hobbit would be expanded from two to three movies, a lot of people cried foul about it. ?It's a greedy decision,? they?d say. ?When you consider the plot of the book, it's impossible,? they tweeted. ?Why?? they thought. And they were all wrong.
I totally understand why The Hobbit is being split into three movies. It makes perfect sense.
My copy of The Hobbit is two-hundred-and-eighty-seven pages. I got exhausted just writing that last sentence. The Fellowship Of The Ring was one-hundred-seventy-eight minutes long, and each Hobbit film will be at least that time. That's five-hundred-thirty-four minutes total. This means that The Hobbit films (or The Lord Of The Rings: Episodes I, II and III) will cover 1.86 minutes per page. That's completely doable. It's called math, nerds. You might?ve figured it out if you could reach past your body pillow to grab a calculator.
And greed? Sorry, Occupy Middle Earth, but greed?s not a part of it. The smiles of children, however, are. Kids don't read books. Kids have as much interest in classic fantasy novels as they do with learning where plastic comes from, which is no interest at all. You can't put a price on a first-grader?s happiness, but YOU CAN let them see three giant movies based on one small book. Who?s going to know the difference? I know that my lips are sealed.
Also, as ?great? as Tolkien was, sometimes he left shit out. There are a lot of plot holes that he just leaves unanswered in The Hobbit and God forbid we have another Dark Knight Rises story on our hands again. Was he taking a nap when he wrote this book? Or did he let an illiterate person ghostwrite it for him? He?d probably be a better writer if he didn't spend all of his dictionary time trying to find the word ?boobs? and giggling.
Sometimes, Tolkien will write stuff like ?the trees,? which leaves us with a big ?what the fuck? moment. What kind of trees, Tolkien? Are they coniferous? Deciduous? What kind of climate does this part of Mirkwood Forest specifically have? I'm trying to get a grasp of this world that he's trying to build, but I'd have a better chance trying to read Braille written in smoke signals.
Peter Jackson is going to fix all of this. I'm going to get to know about the trees that Tolkien was too lazy to describe. Tolkien wrote that Gollum ate fish. How many fish did he eat a day? How big were the fish? It's all simple biology, but Tolkien just ?expects? us to get it without beating us over the heads with it. Sorry, genius writer, but sometimes we need a little hand holding. I want to know everything. And The Hobbit, in its current form, is more hot tub brochure than novel.
Also, remember, we're dealing with the future of movie making here. The Hobbit is getting shot at ten billion frames per second, or something, in Supermax digital. It's going to show us every crumb in every extra?s beard, because that's what we asked for. Did that Wood Elf have soup for lunch? The cameras are so good that he?ll open his mouth a thousand feet away, and I'll smell it on his breath. Do Wood Elves even eat soup? I might know if Tolkien was at least adequate at his job.
Some people have said that there aren't enough climactic stopping points in The Hobbit. Did you guys see The Two Towers or The Return Of The King? Peter Jackson is going to stop a movie whenever the fuck he wants to, as many times as he wants to. He has every right to smash cut to credits in the middle of an important Gandalf monologue if he feels like it.
The title also includes An Unexpected Journey. And how unexpected would it be for one book to be expanded into three mega films? I wouldn't see it coming if you taped it to the back of my eyelids. One movie per book? That's just what a boring, sane person would expect.
Lastly, how dumb is a two movie box set going to look? At the end of it all, the BluRay collection is going to look best with three movies. And since it's going to come out around 2015, we probably won't even be using BluRay anymore, but incredible new MindPax. And MindPax are best directly injected into the brain in groups of threes.
So, before anyone spouts off again about how unnecessary three Hobbit movies are, they need to check a little thing called ?logic.? Because The Hobbit absolutely needs to be three movies.
Dave says
Give me a break. Who do you work for… MGM. Your not fooling anyone. This is an obvious money making scheme. As far as movies of novels go. It’s not a literal page to screen conversion. It’s about the story & how it’s told. It’s a concise thing & dragging it out is not telling the story. I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan & also a Peter Jackson fan (I even like King Kong). But don’t think people are idiots. It’s rude & only makes you less convincing. Just think about what your saying.
James says
You have no idea what your talking about. People want a story to be told, not some drawn out 10 hour or more tortuous affair. No way is the Hobbit that kind of screen time. What takes place in the Lord of the Rings is understandably an epic 3 movie story. The Hobbit is not that. Sounds like your trying to convince yourself as much as anyone else.
tony says
Dude dosent anybody get the sarcastic remarks in the post or was it just me? I think for the the most parts he was joking idiots. Also the more I think about it the more I like the idea of it being 2 parts rather then 3 or 1. The whole 1.86 min a page was a funny fact but I doubt they will do it page by page bc that’s almost never the case. Anyways to tell a good story you sometimes need all the screen time you can get. Hell the original movies wernt even enough to get the books out. They prob should have done 3 parts for each book lol jk but still. If you don’t like the idea of 3 parts or 2 just don’t see the fucking movie
addicted4444 says
How did both the commentators above miss the clear sarcasm in this piece?
Jack says
Ok first of all you obviously don’t know shit about Tolkien. Why in the fuck do you need to know what kind of fish Gollum ate? Also the trees get explained, I dunno if you saw LOTR or not. The reason they are expanding it is simple. The first two movies are the Hobbit split up into two parts, which makes perfect sense. The second part is most likely going to involve what Gandalf did when he left the company in Mirkwood, because like you said, some things are left out. What he actually did was gather Elrond and an army of Elves to defeat the Necromancer of Dol Guldur (Sauron).
Blake says
I also do not understand comedy.
Blake says
SARCASM!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!
Fred says
Hey morons. It’s F’ing sarcasm, this isn’t a legit article. Relax.
stella says
People have no sense of humour any more. Sadly, today even Brits fail to understand English humour — the nation’s most important contribution to the world culture. This is a Dickensian style satire along the lines of the London Olympics opening ceremony, although most people didn’t grasp it.