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Finally!!! Can't WAIT till the live action film is out!!!

Read the news here!!
www.TheHobbitBlog.com

Now this is Bilbo Baggins story correct?

peter Jackson is only PRODUCING :}

Although Peter did a nice job with the previous three films, I'd like to see what another director can do with the franchise.

MoonKit wrote:Now this is Bilbo Baggins story correct?

Yes, that is correct. Its in The Hobbit that Bilbo finds the Ring.

This is going to an awesome prequel.

I am really curious about it. I think that it could be a very cool and entertaining movie^^

Great! Like the rest of you, I hope they kept the quality there.

It looks like they've also stuck with the story again: W00T!

I wonder if they will use the original story or the re-written version for the movie. The re-written version says that the original is full of lies & stuff that Bilbo made up.
Also, the re-written version connects more to LotR.

Also, I hope they won't cut the book in half or make a 2nd movie without source material....

I can't imagine they'd even think of using the original version; that one's been out of print since some time in the 1940s and I don't think it's ever been available in any form since then.

I vaguely recall reading somewhere they were planning on making two movies, presumably the first one would end somewhere in Mirkwood and the second one would have all the dragons and stuff.

I know it has been a week, but I think it is good to bring this up...

Is anyone else concerned that they are going to be making The Hobbit and a sequel? The Lord of the Rings was the sequel to The Hobbit. That means they are going to write totally new material for the following movie. Other than the Similarion, which is historic accounts of Middle-Earth rather than a story, there is no more source material to be used.

I am not sure I like the idea of them creating an entirely new storyline that was not first drafted by JRR Tolkien.

I'm not getting my hopes too high for this.

From what I heard, the book will be split into 2 movies.
But with more White Council scenes and the attack on the Necromancer's(Sauron) fortress near Mirkwood. And probably expanding more stuff.

CORRECTION!!!
The Hobbit will be two, that is 2, movies instead of one. Ah yes, I see these coming out before we reach the 2020's.
And of course Peter Jackson is producing it. After all, he can't direct The Hobbit and the Halo movie all at once now would he?
I'll be watching this topic. That's for sure.

Personaly i'm not a LOTR fan but i must agree he does know what he's doing.

Wasn't the Hao project put on indefinate hold ?

I think it said the first movire will be in 2010 ? That should be right after the Harry Potter series ends and people will want a new fantasy outlet.

Smaug will be the highlight for me...being the the Dragon fanatic I am... someone better be making a HUGE toy figure of him as well...

Ashkin-Tyr wrote:I know it has been a week, but I think it is good to bring this up...

Is anyone else concerned that they are going to be making The Hobbit and a sequel? The Lord of the Rings was the sequel to The Hobbit. That means they are going to write totally new material for the following movie. Other than the Similarion, which is historic accounts of Middle-Earth rather than a story, there is no more source material to be used.

I am not sure I like the idea of them creating an entirely new storyline that was not first drafted by JRR Tolkien.

I think he said "Prequel", as in the Star wars series- not Sequel as in something else afterwards.

And I HAVE a first edition of the Hobbit, released in 1947, the year of my birth. The one that was re-written for the movie may be more cinematic; but the Original "Hobbit" is the Original...

As for the Similarion: it's a digest of J.R.R. Tolkien's works that never made it into novel form*. The last book by the author was, I believe, "The Worm Ourborus". That, too is set in Middle Earth; but it is a very different middle earth from LOTR.

*Back in the age of Paper, it was not uncommon for a writer to do a "Short Story" or "Novella" as a sort of "Place-holder" for a yet-to-be-developed plot. That got the idea out, and the writer could gauge the reactions to see if making a full length story out of it was worth the work and effort. It used to be really hard to write; and it wasn't inexpensive, either. "Shorties" tested the water for the author.

The Hobbit as a novel was set before the Lord of the Ring trilogy, so it makes sense it will be a prequel. I'm in some ways pleased they're doing it as two films--that way they can get the whole novel without cutting out too much, but we can see the film without having to hold our pee through the climax.

Red Eye... You're fairly much on the right track, but there's a bit more to the story than just that.

Tolkien started writing what would eventually become The Silmarillion some time around 1916. The original idea was for the story to be an entire cycle of myths, the structure of which he'd already got fairly much sorted out in his head. However he had got the original cycle about half written when he changed tack and started writing two of the central stories out as narrative poems. These in turn got set aside when he decided to write a bare-bones summary of the entire cycle; this summary made up quite a lot of the content of The Silmarillion as published.

Meanwhile he'd been telling his children stories of a completely different tone - simple adventure stories, not great myths - and it was one of these (largely written in about 1930, completed and published in 1937, I think) that ended up published as The Hobbit. This book was enough of a success on its initial publication that the publisher concerned started pestering Tolkien for a sequel. He wanted to finish writing his myths, but the clincher was that books like The Hobbit made a bit of money and books like The Silmarillion didn't really, back then.

The story of The Lord of the Rings as it became, ended up being in conflict with the original The Hobbit in the matter of Gollum and the riddle game, and thus a revised edition of The Hobbit was published some time around 1950 - after The Lord of the Rings was finished but well before its eventual publication. (This revised edition wasn't anything to do with the proposed movie - it was to do with the impending publication of The Lord of the Rings. Incidentally, I'd suggest you hang on to your copy of the first version... I'd guess it could become quite a collectable book. I've never seen a copy of the first version yet and I've been building up a small library of Tolkien's books for the last couple of decades).

While waiting for a publishing contract, Tolkien had gone back to The Silmarillion and had started writing very much expanded versions of some of the myths. (A selection of these were published as Unfinished Tales a few years after The Silmarillion was published; as you can probably guess from the title, they never got finished either). And, just to muddy things even further, a revised version of The Lord of the Rings was published in 1966. This had nothing to do with impending films, either, but was more to do with the vagaries of American copyright law of the time; the first version of The Lord of the Rings had become public domain and a materially different version was required so that Tolkien's publishers could protect their interests). Most of this rewriting involved fix-ups to things that Tolkien didn't think worked quite right in the first version of the book; there is nothing changed here on the scale of the rewritten riddle-game of The Hobbit.

Incidentally, The Worm Ouroboros is from a totally different author: Eric R. Eddison. It's a good read, once you get over what is now (but wasn't in the 1920s) the known astronomical impossibility of it being set on the planet Mercury; and of the heroes and villains being from the races of Demons and Witches, yet written as utterly human.