Lord Of The Rings fans everywhere spent last week crying and cuddling their special limited edition seven-hour extended Return Of The King DVD boxsets extra hard, all because Peter Jackson had been ruled out of directing the Hobbit movies.

But it turns out that all this spoddy anguish may have been misplaced to begin with. Although Peter Jackson said that New Line didn’t want him to direct two Lord Of The Rings prequelling Hobbit movies, he didn’t say what would happen if any other studios wanted to make a Hobbit movie or two. And guess what? It’s expected that New Line will lose the movie rights to The Hobbit next year, at which point MGM wants to snap them up and get Peter Jackson onboard as well to direct the Hobbit movie that the fans clearly want – a million-hour-long Hobbit spectacular starring Peter Jackson as all the characters from The Hobbit with special effects hand-drawn by Peter Jackson and sound effects all done by Peter Jackson’s mouth like that bloke out of Police Academy used to do.