Last Hobbit movie out, no more Tolkien? I think not!

[Wolfie]

So evidently most people are not aware of this but Tolkien did not write just lotr and the hobbit he also wrote 12 books just about the history of middle earth totaling 3,500 pages... But there are also several other books he wrote:
Bilbo's Last song - poem about what happens after Biblo leaves on the boat at the end of lotr.
Tales from the Perilous Realm - Collection of short stories mostly about Tom Bombadil who is the guy in the hut in Lotr who rescues them from the shade and when asked why they couldn't leave the ring with him Gandalf replied with "the ring holds no power over him, he would simply forget about it and lose it". He is also arguably the oldest being in middle earth basically a god around from the very start.

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The Children of Hurin - A story that takes place hundreds of years before the Hobbit. A demon and an angel escape into middle earth and war breaks out to take over it. Describes a lot about the origin of man.
The Silmarillion - It is a history of the 5 ages of middle earth, just the highlights. It is 700 pages-ish long and written in the same style as my "History of Rs" Article... it is a 700 page summary of just the highlights... The events of the Hobbit and Lotr take up the last 2 pages... Do you have any idea how many more full length stories could have been written if this guy was immortal? ;_;

[youtube]Po_k1w35Lfk[/youtube]​

Unfinished Tales - Another collection of random stories by Tolkien his son had published after his death.

Why do people love Lotr:

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Long story short: The Hobbits are the main characters and they are from a sheltered country side so we learn things as they are explained to them. This is called "exposition" and is vital in every story and the most challenging in fantasy stories because they can require everything to be explained from the color of the sky to carnivorous trees, how money works, the terrain, population density, world government and ect. Typically this is incredibly boring for the reader because it is just facts thrown at you (Personally I love exposition) and hard to write because it should be obvious to all the characters so the author needs to find a way to restate the obvious so the reader can know without making all his characters look ********.

In lotr the characters are sheltered and the person they ask for answers (Gandalf usually) is illusive and doesn't give them too much info at once and deliberately leaves things out at times. This creates a constant trickle of information to the characters so as not to overwhelm and not to bore and also not to state the obvious. Additionally every time they learn, we learn. Constantly sharing these experiences make us far more likely to bond with the characters. Each time they ask about something it is probably something we wanted to know and then we share the learning experience with them.

Also these stories are written in a mysterious style. With information lost, missing, missplaced, or simply ill informed. Reading lotr is like exploring the ruins of an ancient castle. You can see the big details like the archways and supports and some walls and subfloors but large chunks of wall and ceiling have been lost to time. The series and its many works are riddled with plotholes and inconsistencies and the reason is theorized to be because we are not reading the events as they have happened but as they have been recorded by historians over the years. So reading lotr is like reading ancient scrolls passed down over the ages. You can practically feel the dilapidation and distortion of minor details as you try to make sense of it all. It is an incredible experience for any lover of ancient mysteries.

The characters you might not know about having only been familiar with 4 books in the series:
The Dragons! Smaug is... nothing compared to some of the other notable dragons.

The big bads! Sauron was just a priest for a dark god! Sauron was the guy in charge of worshiping this massive evil God that was at one point walking the earth. A dark giant with a massive hammer that would tear open the earth and create earthquakes when he swung it.

A battle with an army of Balrogs led by the father of all dragons!

Glaurung the dragon

Gothmog king of the Balrogs

Ancalagon the black largest of the dragons

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So if you think the hobbit was the end... think again! We have enough material to expand into LIFETIMES of Tolkien! I just hope we get better expansion than was done in the hobbit on future works.

 

[Justac00lguy]

I've always found the first age to be the most fascinating out of the three, even before the first age began (the tale of the two trees and Ungoliant for example). But for me, if they were going for a another trilogy, whatever, it would have to be centered around Melkor and Fingolfin. That would be crazy.

 

[Stitch]

I doubt any more movies will be made any time soon, the Tolkien Estate owns the film and merchandising rights to the rest of Tolkien's books from what I understand and they don't have a great history with the production companies that have made the movies so far.

 

[Djinn]

Like most fantasy stories Tolkien's stuff also had that older mythic age where things were just a thousand times more magical. It always comes off as more interesting than the common mundane age that the current story resides in.

I think the problem is that even in book format most of the general public only knows about the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. Everything else is really considered backstory and filler. The Silmarillion is actually a very hard read and presents itself more like the bible of Middle Earth. Like the bible it is a massive collection of stories that make any transition to another media format nearly impossible without cherry picking stories or just leaving loads of it out. Certain individual stories can be a full length movie or movies easily enough without ever getting a fraction of the overall book. Then Heroes of Middle Earth, and Lost Tales are again various stories of the first and second age that are already glossed over in the Silmarillion. Nothing else is really the full epic tale that the Hobbit and LOTR were.

The next issue is that I really do not think Peter Jackson should be at the helm. There is so much evidence that he really did not care a lot about the Hobbit, just phoned in a lot of parts or just was not as interested in some aspects. I get the impression he did not want to do another Tolkien film but was considered the expert and fans/production companies demanded him anyway until he gave in. Now he just wanted it to be over with and that led to some lazy parts being added in to the last movie. Then that comes to the issue of who else to get? Because you definitely want someone like PJ that is a fan of the source material and does not want to fundamentally alter huge aspects of the story to make it their own unique product, which is an annoying past time of a lot of ego driven directors. (just look at the atrocity the potential 1980's LOTR movie would have been if it were made. It was a trainwreck in the making) This can be an almost impossible task since you need someone that is both a fan and can maintain the same level of quality that fans will be expecting.

 

[Wolfie]

Oh there will be more movies, thinking otherwise is just silly. The Tolkien family does own the rights and they have currently refused to sell them but that is only because they done goof'd and sold the rights to Lotr and the Hobbit for cheap and didn't make anything off them. So it is literally just them being upset they missed out and waiting to hear the right number.

Also the fact that Hollywood is trying to buy them means they already have something planned and certainly can offer enough money I mean it is Tolkien for gods sakes.

 

[Mipha]

Cool. I've read all of the middle earth books.

 

[Djinn]

Oh there will be more movies, thinking otherwise is just silly. The Tolkien family does own the rights and they have currently refused to sell them but that is only because they done goof'd and sold the rights to Lotr and the Hobbit for cheap and didn't make anything off them. So it is literally just them being upset they missed out and waiting to hear the right number.

Also the fact that Hollywood is trying to buy them means they already have something planned and certainly can offer enough money I mean it is Tolkien for gods sakes.

Yea I think that leads to the next real problem, Christopher Tolkien has to kick the bucket before any more rights can be obtained. I'm certain the rest of the family are more willing to actually recreate that mountain filled with gold just as soon as they have the ability to sign off more media rights. But Christopher's annoying little "author's integrity" keeps getting in the way of that.


...which is kind of funny considering his father was the author and he is just riding on the coattails his entire professional life...

 

[Batman]

Hello. Resident Tolkien expert here.

So evidently most people are not aware of this but Tolkien did not write just lotr and the hobbit he also wrote 12 books just about the history of middle earth totaling 3,500 pages...

Only about 300 of those thousands of pages is actual new story-content that adds anything plot-wise to the mythos, and quite a bit of those 300 pages Tolkien outright rejected for inclusion into his mythos later in his life. The rest of the content in the 12 volume History of Middle-earth series consists of Tolkien's drafts and notes, most of it now obsolete canon-wise as it just shows the history of his writing; the changes, the additions, the subtractions, etc of the same overall content throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. HoME basically consists of early versions of The Silmarillion and LotR, as well as really insightful notes which give more detail about the nuances of his world, but which add almost nothing plot-wise to the tales of Arda (therefore, most if it is not material to make into movies). Also, Christopher Tolkien, John's son and literary heir, is the one that collected all this material and edited it and annotated it, so it's not like Tolkien himself wrote 12 books. Tolkien had no intention of ever publishing most of these things. Christopher's goal was not to add more tales to the already published stories so much as it was simply share his father's notes (and thus his thought-process) to give obsessives a more intimate glimpse into the evolution of his father's work. That’s it. It’s a common misconception that HoME is just a huge collection of new tales, but it most certainly is not.

Bilbo's Last song - poem about what happens after Biblo leaves on the boat at the end of lotr.
Tales from the Perilous Realm - Collection of short stories mostly about Tom Bombadil who is the guy in the hut in Lotr who rescues them from the shade and when asked why they couldn't leave the ring with him Gandalf replied with "the ring holds no power over him, he would simply forget about it and lose it". He is also arguably the oldest being in middle earth basically a god around from the very start.

Bilbo's Last Song takes place as he's about to leave the Grey Havens, it doesn't tell what happens to Bilbo after he sails into the West.

Tales from the Perilous Realm is almost completely unrelated. It’s a collection of short stories, but only one tiny section of that book deals with Tom Bombadil, and indeed Middle-earth at all. It’s a collection of poems called The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, written by hobbits, and only a few of the several poems there even deal with Tom. As for Tom being a god, you might find this article interesting:
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/t/tombombadil.html

But again, there’s not any content in these two works that could be made into movies.

The Children of Hurin - A story that takes place hundreds of years before the Hobbit. A demon and an angel escape into middle earth and war breaks out to take over it. Describes a lot about the origin of man.
The Silmarillion - It is a history of the 5 ages of middle earth, just the highlights. It is 700 pages-ish long and written in the same style as my "History of Rs" Article... it is a 700 page summary of just the highlights... The events of the Hobbit and Lotr take up the last 2 pages... Do you have any idea how many more full length stories could have been written if this guy was immortal? ;_;
[youtube]Po_k1w35Lfk[/youtube]
Unfinished Tales - Another collection of random stories by Tolkien his son had published after his death.

Your synopsis of The Children of Húrin only tells a tiny bit about the backstory, not the story of the actual novel itself. The actual plot of The Children of Húrin is a longer version of the story “Of Túrin Turambar” in The Silmarillion, and tells the tragic life story of Túrin Turambar and his family’s struggles against the devices of Morgoth. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_H%C3%BArin#Synopsis for more, but I suggest you not spoil the plot by reading this and actually read the novel for yourself first. It’s a masterpiece and I highly recommend it. Also, Children of Húrin takes place nearly 7,000 years before The Hobbit, not mere hundreds.

Also, the Silmarillion is much more than simply a summary of “highlights”. It’s a detailed account of the entire history of the world, including the creation of Arda in the time before time, and especially deals with the First Age in great detail. Much of the Second Age and early Third Age is told as well.

Unfinished Tales, unlike the HoMe series, is actually a decent source for more stories. The book compiles several stories that, surprise surprise, are unfished! But even in their unfished states, they could certainly serve as plot material for movies or TV, especially in tandem with Silmarillion materials.

These three things you mentioned, CoH, Silmarillion, and UT, could all certainly be used to make several movies and TV series and indeed tell of a time in Middle-earth that is far more epic than anything we get to see in LotR or Hobbit.

The Dragons! Smaug is... nothing compared to some of the other notable dragons.

Definitely. I made a post about Ancalagon yesterday in fact: http://zeldadungeon.net/forum/threads/most-iconic-dragons-in-literature-cinema-games-etc.51216/#post-928177

So if you think the hobbit was the end... think again! We have enough material to expand into LIFETIMES of Tolkien! I just hope we get better expansion than was done in the hobbit on future works.

I share your enthusiasm and would absolutely love to see the material in Silmarillion be made into a major movie series or well-done TV series or even series of series, but unfortunately the Tolkien Estate refuses to ever let the rights go. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were able to be made into movies because J.R.R. Tolkien himself released the movie rights during his lifetime. Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R.’s literary heir and owner of the copyrights, hates the LotR and Hobbit movies and refuses to release the rights to the Silmarillion or anything else his father wrote. This is partly because he doesn’t want Hollywood to “desecrate” his father’s masterpieces and partly because the Tolkien Estate and the movie-makers have been involved in several heated legal battles over royalties, so there’s bad blood on the legal front and on a literary integrity front.

I believe we will eventually get to see movies detailing the earlier ages in Middle-earth, but I fear it will be a long time before this happens. Christopher's authority will eventually be handed over to someone else after his death, so maybe that person will be more willing to have movies made. We'll have to wait and see.

 

[HeroOfTime]

I think if they were to make another movie anytime soon if would be from like the Silmarillion or the adventures of tob bombadil. everything else I found too boring, and I think the Silmarillion would be the best because of the history it contains, as well as the great story, and they could certainly chop it up into a trilogy.

 

[Wolfie]

@Batman that is a lot to respond to so I'll just try to sum it all up simply.

About the 12 History books: Indeed a lot of it is notes and a lot of it goes against established cannon however it opens up a great deal of possibilities and as you said the works were only compiled by his son and edited slightly they were all still written by him. And just because something is noncannon doesn't mean it can't be made into an alternate universe kind of flick. At the very least the extra information provided in them could provide expansion to his other works to aid in making them into full length films.

Tales from the Perilous Realm - combined with the 12 history books and what was hinted at in lotr could easily generate enough information for a movie about Tom. As he is one of the oldest, most mysterious, and most powerful characters I imagine with a few artistic liberties the movie could very easily stand on its own.

I agree with what you are saying about CoH, and The Silmarillion having potential to be multiple movies. The Silmarillion is actually more like 5 books combined into one so it would be possible to make it into possibly 6 or 7 movies (some ages have very little going on but others have just a massive amount of stuff going on). Personally I'm very eager to see a storyline about the Valar and Morgoth related conflicts and would not mind if some of the other big bads got movies to themselves (like the king of the Balrogs and the notable dragons).

As for waiting for Christopher to die I think all this can be resolved in the typical hollywood way of throwing money at the problem. It worked for Star Wars and getting Ironman to stay in the Avengers after all.

 

[Stitch]

As for waiting for Christopher to die I think all this can be resolved in the typical hollywood way of throwing money at the problem. It worked for Star Wars and getting Ironman to stay in the Avengers after all.

The problem is that throwing money at it is a huge risk. The audience been losing interest in Middle Earth throughout the years (just look at the box office gross and critical response to the Hobbit films) and there is no longer a widely recognized IP left from Middle Earth, so there is no guarantee that enough people will be interested to be worth the money. There's a good chance it could also turn into a bidding war between studios, meaning that they could end up very different from the Middle Earth films we've come to love. At this point I can't see Warner Bros. pushing for the rights in the near future and by the time that they decide they want to go back to Middle Earth, there's always the terrifying possibility that they could reboot it and remake TLotR or The Hobbit. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a chance, even if it is small, that we may not be able to see the great beyond of Middle Earth; or at least the way we think we'll see it.

 

[Wolfie]

@Stitch the problem isn't that people are losing interest in middle earth it is just that they took something that should have been 2 movies and turned it into 3. Even that might have been forgiven if the expansions they had made had been halfway decent.

And then they added a female character just to make her fall in love and be one of those "slave to love" characters. She is just not a good character.

But if they had kept things in Tolkien style and not made really bad often immature jokes I think The Hobbit could have been another classic. Even with them mucking it up it still came in as number 5 for the year which isn't bad considering it was still going when the year ended.

(Btw I'm not saying everything they expanded on was bad, I liked meeting Legolas' dad and learning he fought dragons in the past and a lot of the other stuff they did.)

 

[Hanyou]

I think Children of Hurin would be the next best choice for an adaptation, but I really hope Jackson keeps his hands off of it. Considering the estate's opinion of his movies, that shouldn't be a problem.