Bad news for Tolkien fans: Peter Jackson won’t be making a live-action film version of The Hobbit after all. Following the stunning financial and artistic success of his Lord of the Rings films, I think everyone just assumed that any further cinematic adventures in Middle-Earth would naturally be Jackson’s babies as well. Now, however, New Line Cinema has decided to look for another director to do the Hobbit film and possibly a second LOTR prequel as well (whatever that may be). The breaking point, not surprisingly, was over money, specifically a lawsuit Jackson’s company brought against New Line concerning the profits from The Fellowship of the Ring. (Basically, Jackson feels he didn’t get what he was owed due to some dicey and/or shady accounting practices on the part of New Line.) New Line apparently hoped it could bluff him into dropping the suit, using The Hobbit as its bet. Jackson called the studio’s hand, the film deal is off, and the lawsuit continues. You can read Jackson’s complete statement on this matter here.
I’m not exactly a Peter Jackson partisan and I know this sort of thing happens all the time in Hollywood, but it would have been lovely, if a Hobbit film was inevitable, to have it blend seamlessly with the existing LOTR films. That’s still a possibility, but I think the odds of it happening have just gotten much, much longer. More likely we’re going to have a version of The Hobbit that complements Jackon’s trilogy about as well as that bombastic MTV schlock-o-rama version of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned fits with Neil Jordan’s elegant adapation of Interview with the Vampire. C’est la vie, I suppose…
Jason, it may surprise you to know that I’m relieved that Peter Jackson is not doing The Hobbit, and I hope that the idea dies on the vine. As you know, I am a huge admirer of Jackson’s LOTR. But I think that any attempt to produce a version of The Hobbit that would match up stylistically and thematically to the film trilogy would grossly distort the book. The Hobbit is a very different novel than LOTR. Tolkien realized early in the composition of LOTR that he was not writing a sequel to The Hobbit so much as a conclusion to The Silmarillion. He had to come up with some creative ways to bridge The Hobbit with the later work, including the idea that Bilbo Baggins had written the earlier book and had not been quite truthful about key episodes (especially the finding of the One Ring, which was different in the original edition of The Hobbit and had to be revised before LOTR was published). The chapters “The Shadow of the Past” and “The Council of Elrond” in FOTR also provide back-story that puts the events of The Hobbit in the context of the larger, darker history leading up to LOTR. I suspect this is what New Line has in mind for the “prequel” film, but that, too, is a bad idea. Jackson left this material out of the film because it went bayond the story as he was shaping it. Working it up into another installment would feel gratuitous and would probably involve innovations beyond what Tolkien actually wrote. (Jackson already came close to the edge in his handling of the Aragorn-Arwen story, which Tolkien opted to put in the Appendix rather than try to incorporate it into the main narrative). All of which is to say that New Line should leave well enough alone. They’ve already done the impossible, producing a stunning, coherent, largerly faithful version of Tolkien’s masterpiece.
I agree, I’d rather not see a film of The Hobbit at all, but you know how the suits think: LOTR made money, find me something else that features those little guys with furry feet. You’re the expert, of course, so I’ll trust your opinion that the films wouldn’t mesh together under the best of circumstances — it’s been literally decades since I read The Hobbit, and I probably remember the cartoon better than the actual book — but I’d hate to see a inferior prequel riding the coattails and sullying the reputation of the masterful trilogy.
Hm. One might almost think I was speaking from experience, there…
I know you’re right about the suits. Interestingly, that’s almost exactly what Tolkien’s British publishers, Allen & Unwin, said when he began to propose follow-ups to the commercially successful Hobbit. They turned down portions of The Silmarillion, which as you know Tolkien regarded as his real masterwork, because it didn’t have hobbits. Ironically, Rayner Unwin (who as a boy had reviewed and recommended publication of The Hobbit to his father)remarked that the opening draft chapters of LOTR contained rather too much “hobbit-talk.” Clearly Tolkien was not yet resolved about the tone of “sequel” (we know, for example, that Frodo was named “Bingo” for huge portions of the draft and that Aragorn was originally a hobbit called “Trotter”). Perhaps the young Rayner sensed that the jaunty hobbit-talk was not quite appropriate for the darker story that was hovering at the edges of the draft. The Black Riders, who were part of the earliest versions, were more threatening (and, to put it another way, suggestive of a larger mythology involving Evil itself) than anything in The Hobbit.
The story of Tolkien’s relationship with Allen & Unwin is very interesting, with heroes and villains on both sides, but I don’t suppose that’s why you posted this blog. So I’ll be quiet now!
Nah, you never have to restrain yourself from flying off on tangents around this place. That’s kind of what blogging is all about. 🙂
But perhaps this is a topic better shared in person, and over a pint, eh?
Naturally.
I think it’s a good thing Jackson’s not in line for The Hobbit… for much the same reason as Cranky Robert. With LOTR’s stunning success, I imagine a film version of The Hobbit is inevitable. I wouldn’t mind a different director’s take on it, since the book has a completely different feel from LOTR anyway (and Robert has nicely illustrated the back-story on that, so I don’t have to go into it. 🙂 )
Also (and Steve and I have discussed this several times), we think Jackson has “got a little too big for his britches”. I think King Kong nicely illustrates this. To borrow Steve’s words, there are a lot of really nice scenes in King Kong, but the whole movie does not measure up to the sum of its parts. It ends up feeling more self indulgent than it needed to be, mostly because Jackson’s wild success with LOTR means he “can do no wrong.”
Not that I fault Jackson’s obsessive attention to detail…
I bow to the greater knowledge of actual Tolkien fans as to whether or not Jackson’s the man for a Hobbit film. As I mentioned, I haven’t read that book in years, and I’m only passingly familiar with literary Middle-Earth.
As regards King Kong, the major faults I find in Jackson’s version can be traced directly to the original — the 1932 film, despite its many charms, also fails to add up to much in the end. I’m not saying PJ isn’t puffed up from his LOTR success, but I’m not sure KK is evidence of this. Also, there is the “sophomore slump” phenomenon to consider; I know LOTR was not PJ’s first effort, but it was his first big film project (and brother was it big!), so I think it probably isn’t fair to make any generalizations about him until we see his next movie, whatever that is.