It’s not the first time the world has seen a series of books turned into a series of movies. But a series of movies from one book? Some of the more dedicated fans of The Hobbit are content with the idea of having three movies, as more substance can be put from the book into the movies. But the general audience is asking why. Why take a 310 page book and expand it into a movie-making process of three years? The director of The Lord of the Rings and now The Hobbit, Peter Jackson, has a few answers to that, so frequently asked, question. “The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-Earth.” Jackson says.
The appendices are just one of the reasons he wants to make three movies though. Another is that the producers of the movies have only had the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Because of the little rights they have compared to everything else J.R.R. Tolkein ever wrote, they’re going to make the most of it.
“[The appendices] talk about the White Council and the Necromancer and they refer to the attack on Dol Guldur and various plotting limits, and it’s that type of plot that we are developing into The Hobbit.” Jackson elaborates, “We know how much the history of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance.”
Jackson states, “It’s written in a very breathless pace so that pretty major events in the story are covered in only two to three pages by Tolkien.”
Although The Hobbit is the main source of material for these movies, J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, wrote nearly 130 pages of Hobbit backstory called The Appendices, which Jackson will be using too. This backstory will provide a deeper sense of the world they’re in and how exactly things came to be. Tolkien’s book The Silmarillion, about the history of Middle-earth, will not be one of the materials used because the film rights do not belong to Warner Bros.. There have also been rumors that Jackson has access to an unpublished version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit that he may be taking ideas from, but that is unconfirmed.
More often than not, directors and producers have to cut out certain parts of books to make the movie short enough for people to actually sit through, it will be different to see otherwise in The Hobbit.
A large and important part of the three movies, is the budget. The director of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has a production budget of $250,000,000. The Budget for the second and third movie is now $315,000,000 because of the gross profit of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was $1,045,778,374. The gross profit being as high as it was will help the other movies in their production without having to worry about the money costs as much.
As stated before, the producers decided to make it into three movies so they could fit all of the information from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the movies. The budget is helping them because the producers gave them higher budgets for the next two movies. The budget of the last two movies will help the expense of costumes and the technology.
Many of the costumes were reused in the second and third movie so they didn’t have to spend the money on them out of the second and third budget. With using the costumes more than once, they still felt that raising the budget would be good because they had many other things they needed like technology or adding actors and actresses.The costumes and the equipment is very important in making a movie so with the budget being higher, they have money to spend on more important things for the last two movies.
The readers of Lord of the Rings will enjoy it too since a lot of material from The Appendices of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will be coming out. Because of when they were filming and how they were filming with so much detail, they had to make more than one movie. So, with that said, they now have $630,000,000 for two movies which will help dramatically with what they can do and what they can do better.
“But just because J.R.R. Tolkien wrote one novel, and Peter Jackson is giving us three films, doesn’t mean that the decision was solely about money.” says Leslie Gornstein of Empire Magazine.
The largest part of the budget and another reason Jackson made three movies, is the technology used to film it all. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be the first movie in the world made at a frame rate of 48 frames per second, faster than the 24 frames per second which is the industry standard. These cameras are, also, never before used, RED EPIC cameras. These cameras are able to capture all the visual storyline, characters and scenery in nothing less than 3D.
“I'm a technophobe.” Says Jackson, “I don't know how the technology works. But I know what the technology is capable of, which is the important thing.”
The human eyes can capture well over 200 FPS so 48 is that much closer to how we see images every day. Filmmakers have held back when it came to using cameras with faster frame speed because of how the audience reacted to seeing a movie in such high quality was unpredictable. While the general audience would get use to seeing it after ten or fifteen minutes, there are some who claim the 48FPS gives them a headache when it’s in 3D.
Another reason these cameras have never been used before is because they are expensive. They cost about $19,077.60 each. The Hobbit used 48 of these cameras! That comes to about $915,724.80 for the cameras alone. That's not the only cost the cameras bring either. Production of the film had to make their own rigs for the cameras to shoot from. There had to be seventeen rigs, ranging from crane supported cameras, to smaller, hand held ones. And because the cameras have a tendency to desaturate images, designers had to over-color costumes, makeup, even props and scenery, adding the extra cost of makeup and paint.
“I have always liked the look of RED footage, though.” Peter Jackson, says, “I'm not a scientist or a mathematician, but the image RED produces has a much more filmic feel than most of the other digital formats.”
There are many things that had to happen for The Hobbit to be made into three movies like the budget, costumes, cast, and the technology. These things are finally done and the movies are waiting to be shown to their eager audience. To everything that has happened and will happen in The Hobbit movies, Jackson says this is “all still part of the Tolkien myth.”
The release date of these three stories are listed below, click the links to watch the trailers.
The Hobbit: There and Back Again (release date: December 17, 2014) (No trailer available)
Authors: Annie Wagner, Sloan Turner, Alyssa Mangin, and Marie Wappes
