Peter Jackson Announces Plans to Release Second Hobbit Film as Three Separate Movies

Filmmaker Peter Jackson, while doing press for the DVD and Blu-ray release of his most recent film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, announced that he is planning on turning the second film in the Hobbit franchise into three separate films of their own.

 

“When we really got into the story and studied it, it became obvious that there’s so much depth that isn’t realized from a quick reading of the original text, or even from a three-and-a-half hour cut of the film,” he said. “We wanted to really get in there and explore it some more.”

Mr. Jackson brushed off criticism that the splitting of the original film, titled The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, is a ploy to get fans to pay for three movies instead of one.

“No, no, no,” he said. “This is a story we want to tell. The journey that Bilbo is on takes weeks. There’s no way to condense it into one film without ultimately sacrificing character development.”

“Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end,” Mr. Jackson continued. “And if you break it down, every beginning, middle, and end has a beginning, middle, and end.

“Plus, we have hours and hours of unused walking footage, and we really owe it to the fans to include all of it.”

Mr. Jackson would not address recent rumors that his next project is a remake of the Lord of the Rings trilogy shot in real time.