Finally….

 

Just as I’m wrapping my final post of the year, this comes along and frankly, it being the film news of the year (yeah, yeah, so Antonioni and Bergman snuffed it, boo hoo…) it warrants it’s own post. I was only saying to a friend how stupid New Line were being with fighting this lawsuit – just give Jackson the $75 million, give him another $150 million to shoot ‘The Hobbit’ as two films, back to back, and another $75 million for marketing and for an outlay of $300 million you are guaranteed a return of $600, $700 million on the films alone, let alone the residuals and DVD’s etc. Finally it looks like Bob Shaye has seen the light.

After the initial excitement from reading through that press release a few warning signs did flare up. Two films, ‘The Hobbit‘ and a sequel to ‘The Hobbit’? Err, hang on a sec there. A SEQUEL? The other is of course is the fact that Jackson is not going to direct. Already the rumour mill has gone into overdrive, even since the story broke last night I’m already finding ‘quotes’ that Jackson has actually agreed to direct, oh, no he hasn’t, Sam Raimi has been offered the project, etc etc. The idea of a ‘sequel’  covering the 80 years between ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ seems fucking crazy until I remembered and as others have pointed out that there is a fair bit of material going in there with the attack on Dol Gulder and Saurons exile back to Mordor, assaults on many of the Dwarven kingdoms including of course Moria, and other general stuff with Aragorn and Gandalf….Hmm.

Sam Raimi? I guess on paper he has the same pedigree as Jackson, both started their careers as genre splatter directors and graduated to studio projects with elements of the fantastic and Raimi, as far as the suits are concerned, can bring in massive releases on budget, on time and make them all fantastically wealthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got the gig, but his style is not suitable for Middle Earth – all those Dutch angles and crash zooms really wouldn’t gel with the epic material.

Andy Serkis and Ian McKellen always vowed that they’d only ever return as Gollum and Gandalf if Jackson was involved, and Ian Holm frankly is getting old if they’re going to, well they have to preserve continuity, have him return as Bilbo. Ah, fuck it, as long as they get Smaug right I’ll be happy. If they wanna go the whole epic route then they really need to look at ‘The Silmarillion‘ as that has battles and events that makes ‘The Return of the King’ look like a playground tussle in comparison. However the film(s) turns out, of course it could never be worse than this…..