We already know that The Hobbit will be released as two films, encompassing the novel itself as well as some extra fiction found in Tolkien’s notes, but will the movies be called The Hobbit Part One and The Hobbit Part Two? Apparently not.
While not official, the titles speculated for The Hobbit may have been revealed thanks to some digging by a contributor at The One Ring
New Line has recently registered the following two film titles:
The Hobbit: There and Back Again
and…
The Hobbit: An/The Unexpected Journey
Of course the original novel was also known as “There and Back Again” so it would make sense that they would use that for at least one of the films, and I can live with An Unexpected Journey or The Unexpected Journey for the second half.
Now this is only strong speculation based on New Line Registering the titles. For all we know, they could be the resgistered titles for trailers, behind the scenes documentaries on the DVD.
But the titles make sense, and they work well with what we already know from the novels.
I just can’t wait to revisit Middle Earth!
helllllllllllllls yeh!
You have no idea how much I am waiting to go back to middle earth. Seeing these movies gives me the misguided hope that a R.A. Salvatore movie based on Drizzt will be made.
Movies based on the Legend of Drizzt? I can’t see that happening. Look at the Sword of Truth books, which are imo much better than the Legend of Drizzt. They make a TV series based on Sword of Truth, called Legend of the Seeker, and its shit. I don’t have much faith in movie studios to create fantasy movies. The Lord of the Rings were crazy good movies. If people could make movie adaptions of fantasy books, and make them decent, I would be a much happier moviegoer.
The true test will be “A Song of Ice and Fire” on HBO.
The thing about fantasy films is that you can’t do them half-assed. Unless you have the big budget, strong cast and top-level effects they are almost guaranteed to be crappy and not do their source material justice. Most studios don’t want to shell out the $$$ for fantasy films, though, as they aren’t really a safe bet in regards to box office returns. For the price of one quality fantasy film a studio could probably make 10 generic romantic comedies and have a much stronger chance of recouping its investment.
Sadly, I think it will be some time before we see another fantasy film similar to LOTR in terms of quality and scale (not including The Hobbit films here, obviously, which should be on the same level as LOTR). LOTR worked because it is such a hugely popular book, and also because Fellowship of the Ring was just a flat-out stunning film which ensured that audiences would just have to see the rest of the series. The only thing that has really come close to the success of LOTR is Harry Potter, largely due to its massive fan base. I really hope someone can prove me wrong and make another big budget, high quality fantasy series (there are hundreds of good book series out there!), but I think we are more likely to see films of middling quality such as the Narnia series than epics like LOTR.
But yeh, bring on The Hobbit