New Line Cinema has finally made nice with Peter Jackson (I’m sure the financial collapse of The Golden Compass had nothing to do with this), and Jackson has now signed to produce and oversee two Hobbit movies. I assume Jackson is willing to actually direct these movies, but is holding out for more money. Or maybe not. That seems likely, though.
Presumably the novel will just be broken up into two parts, allowing for every passage to be featured and sparing fan’s the trauma experienced after the deleting of, say, Tom Bombadil from the LoTR movies.
As with the earlier trilogy, the two films will be shot back to back, and released back to back in 2010 and 2011.
UPDATE: Apparently I’m not alone in my suspicions:
“Why did this happen now, after many years of bitterness between Jackson and New Line over the Lord of the Rings payouts? I suppose there are many reasons, but I would suppose one very relevant proximate cause would be Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne trying to save their asses in the wake of the very expensive The Golden Compass cratering very badly at the box office ($40 million in two weeks, with a nearly 66% dropoff in the second weekend — not good news when your production budget is $180 million and you’ve sold off the foreign rights). My guess: it’ll work.”
New Line really blew it with this one. Outside of the Lord of the Rings movies, and to a lesser extent Narnia, most of the recent fantasy movies have crashed and burned just like this one. (Nor has casting Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman proven as co-stars particularly fruitful for filmmakers. It’s not often co-stars offer us two giant bombs in one year. Craig no doubt will be relieved to get back to his next Bond film. As for Kidman…The Stepford Wives, Birth, The Human Stain, Bewitched, The Invasion…yikes!)
New Line sold off the foreign rights to mitigate the film’s high production budget, but gambled poorly, as the foreign box office has been at least decent as opposed to the domestic box office. Unless New Line got a lot more for those foreign rights than I expect they did, they are going to lose their shirts on this one.
