New Line’s option to make The Hobbit expires in 2009; maybe they don’t think Peter Jackson can get the movie made in time. The company is also already turning its attention to another mega-budgeted fantasy franchise, the His Dark Materials trilogy. But the studio’s motivations became more clear in January, when New Line co-CEO Robert Shaye couldn’t refrain from a retort.
“I do not want to make a movie with somebody who is suing me. It will never happen during my watch,” he said, and then referred to Jackson as “misinformed” and “myopic.” [More]
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“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain wrote after the New York Journal erroneously covered news of his demise. “Mistaken publications of obituaries aren’t as rare as you might expect,” observes The Phrase Finder. We might say the same for the frequency with which greenlit film projects never see the light of a projector lamp, or the number of times “dead” film projects are resurrected.
The scuttlebutt now, of course, as we all know, is that New Line Cinema has greenlit The Hobbit, but that both Peter Jackson and New Line head Robert Shaye declare that Jackson will not be at the helm of the project. At the heart of the issue, at least publicly, is the lawsuit Jackson and company have filed against New Line over profits from the ancillary rights to The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson has said he “won’t discuss making the [Hobbit] movies until the lawsuit is resolved,” and Shaye has gone so far as to declare that he doesn’t “want to make a movie with somebody who is suing me… It will never happen during my watch.” Complicating perception of the truth is Saul Zaentz’ assertion that The Hobbit “will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson.”
What’s really being waged is not a fractious legal dispute. The real battle is a tussle over public opinion. No matter how badly all the parties might want The Hobbit to happen, and for Peter Jackson to be at the helm, they all also know that, until a film actually starts shooting, all bets are off. Even at that point, studios have been known to replace directors. So in the meantime, everyone’s jockeying for influence, control, and as big a share of the pie as possible.
And what all the parties involved want to do is avoid pissing off the fans, upon whom all future largesse depends.
In this case, what that means is preparing us all for the worst possible scenario, whether it plays out or not. And my guess is that both Jackson and Shaye are pretty chafed that Zaentz has been the most forthcoming about the truth of the situation. “Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company,” he told the German website Elbenwald in November. “I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.”
The anxiety over the fate of Jackon’s association with The Hobbit began, for me, the night that The Return of the King won 11 Oscars. This is not, contrary to what some may think, the kind of event that brings glee to men like Robert Shaye. Yes, they are thrilled that their films win such accolades; but when the director’s fee for a follow-up project is guaranteed to skyrocket in the wake of such success, studio heads start to seethe. So immediately after the 2004 Oscars ceremony, the tough money was on the boxoffice results of King Kong: if that film mimicked The Lord of the Rings’ wild financial success, Shaye and New Line were over a barrel; if it tanked, Jackson would have huge contract concessions to make. Sure, Jackson didn’t get the call from New Line’s honchos about The Hobbit that he hoped for during that period; but he wasn’t exactly knocking at their door, either.
So when it became clear to Jackson that New Line wasn’t only stalling, but that they were also stiffing him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars due to the corporate practice of “self-dealing”—granting no-bid merchandising rights to members of its own broad corporate umbrella—he decided to up the ante, filing a lawsuit against New Line on February 28, 2005, according to The New York Times.
When, in actuality, King Kong proved neither a blockbuster nor a dog during the winter of 2005, the waters just got muddied. The fact that conversations had been stalled so long waiting on the outcome of Kong didn’t help, nor did the fact that both sides knew what the mutual silence was all about. All in all, there was nothing left but discontent on all sides.
The business being what it is, this is a story that is far from being over; and given that there are not just one but two studios involved, the political jockeying is far more complex than in most cases. My guess is that Zaentz is a lot closer to right than either Jackson or Shaye would like to admit—and that Shaye may regret the vitriol of his rhetoric. “There’s a certain piggishness involved here,” an unidentified New Line lawyer told The New York Times back in 1995. “New Line already gave [Jackson] enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it’s still not enough for him.” When Shaye recently said, “[Jackson] thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars,” you know who Shaye has been talking to.
The smart money is on Jackson making both The Hobbit and the other planned film, and making them with New Line. Will that take place “on Shaye’s watch”? Maybe not. But since New Line has got corporate masters who may be even more demanding than Shaye, that may just mean bad news for Shaye—and good news for Tolkien film fans.
As to the wisdom of making two movies out of The Hobbit rather than just one, that’s quite a different matter. Without yet getting into the structure that such films might assume, it’s fair to say that Tolkien wouldn’t have written the same story that he did had he written it subsequent to The Lord of the Rings.
First, we know that, when Tolkien began writing The Hobbit, he had no intention of it becoming a part of the history of Middle-earth. Second, we know that Tolkien had to later revise The Hobbit to make it consistent with his masterwork, retooling Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum. Third, we know that Tolkien had to temporarily suspend work on Rings in order to work out exactly how characters like Elrond, Gandalf, Aragorn, and the Hobbits themselves fit into his broader mythology. Fourth, we know that Tolkien gave up writing a Rings sequel because the material simply became “too dark.”
Complicating matters is the general perception amongst many fans—a sentimental, romanticized, and unexamined perception—that The Hobbit is a light, whimsical fantasy. It is not. It is, in fact, an allegorical bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale, a story of loss of innocence. It’s about children no longer covering their eyes in terror and imagining giants and bogies, but rather coming to see the world with eyes wide open and finding out that the most dangerous monsters may be some of their fellow adventurers. The conventions of fantasy may dispose of Smaug quite neatly; dealing with Thorin—or Bilbo’s own complicity in a Great Wrong—is another matter entirely, but one which is at the heart of The Hobbit.
Given that The Lord of the Rings has already come to the screen, though (and stupendously so), we have already seen how blithe young Hobbits such as Pippin must learn to become grave warriors; we have already witnessed the darkness of battles like that at the Pelennor; through Théoden, we have already witnessed sleepers waking to the harsh reality of betrayal and self-deception; we have, in short, already lost the innocence of Middle-earth. Trying to recapture it—on a scale that would duplicate the boxoffice success of Rings—would be a bit like returning to fifth-grade summer camp after a stint in college.
So two choices present themselves: first, scale back the design of The Hobbit as Lord of the Rings Lite for the younger set, and hope that Peter Jackson’s fans have all spawned their own sets of Hobbit-sized kindergarteners who will be thrilled with a Curious George version of Middle-earth; or second, embrace the tone of the last third of The Hobbit and integrate the tale seamlessly with Peter Jackson’s other films. Boxoffice potential almost dictates the wisdom of the latter choice, regardless of the “violence” it does to Tolkien’s original tale.
If the first approach is taken, however, it would allow—perhaps even necessitate—all of the major roles to be recast. In order to see Gandalf in an entirely different light, for instance, a new Gandalf might be required. When pursuing this line of thinking, the financial wheels start turning, and we can pretty easily envision a project of this flavor if New Line somehow manages to go ahead without Peter Jackson (and the wallets of Jackson’s dedicated and thoroughly adult fanbase), especially considering that Jackson would never make such a film.
The second approach, though, begs for McKellan to return as Gandalf, Serkis as Gollum, and Holm as Bilbo—who, we must remember, convincingly played the younger Bilbo in Jackon’s “flashback” scenes as well as the opening sequences of Fellowship.
It also opens up intriguing possibilities for the proposed second Hobbit film—which, by the way, I think is a brilliant concept. Fans of The Lord of the Rings, the book, know that there’s a wealth of historical detail that’s left entirely out of Peter Jackson’ films. In particular, the length of time between Bilbo’s departure from Hobbiton and Frodo’s is collapsed to mere weeks rather than years. This presents a fantastic opportunity to create a narrative—once again temporally collapsed, as with Jackson’s trilogy—that tells both the tale of Sauron’s abandonment of Dol Guldur and the long search for Gollum.
The added bonus? Added roles for Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, Liv Tyler as Arwen, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, and Orlando Bloom as Legolas—maybe even John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. All of these characters were alive during the period of The Hobbit, and were certainly active during the period between the two tales. Heck, we might even get a major role for Craig Parker again as Haldir, which would make his subsequent death in The Two Towers all that more poignant.
And these are two films that Jackson should be the one to make, and ones that I would look forward to seeing.
Yet it behooves the fan base, I think, not to become too territorial with the intellectual rights to The Hobbit. The film production business is as wild and wooly as the American West (or the Far East of Middle-earth) once was. When on the frontier, wizards and artists will do what artists and wizards must; the best that we, the fans, can hope for is to voice our concerns—and then, for lightning to strike twice.
Greg Wright is the author of Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter, and is Writer in Residence at Puget Sound Christian College in Everett, Washington. Formerly Contributing Editor at Hollywood Jesus, Greg’s collected essays on Tolkien and Jackson have just been republished in a new archive at the site. Greg is now Managing Editor of Gospelcom’s movie review site Past the Popcorn.
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“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” So said Galadriel to Frodo in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings.
It’s a line that resonates strongly with us as people. It offers hope that the little man or woman can, indeed, triumph.
At TheOneRing.net, we firmly believe it ought to be our motto for The Hobbit.
If Lord of the Rings made “bongo bucks” for New Line Cinema, Peter Jackson and a lot of other people, it was in no small part due to the passionate enthusiasm of Tolkien fans worldwide — lovers of JRR’s incredible story who saw something similarly magical in the vision of Peter Jackson and the people who worked with him.
Yet it seems as though the parties involved in the Hobbit have forgotten that it’s the fans who are the source of all the money they’re currently fighting over.
Since Peter Jackson’s and Fran Walsh’s open letter to fans, we’ve witnessed a mass outpouring of disbelief and frustration at the current impasse — and the thought that this might be the end of the Peter Jackson-New Line partnership. Jackson and Walsh proclaim that it is. But one wonders whether New Line is now carefully reconsidering its options.
Studios would be wise to listen to the rumblings of their core audience. After all, we saw what happened with The Hulk.
It might be that the number of fans who would actually boycott the Hobbit would be a small proportion of the total audience. Still, their influence on the merchanidise and DVD sales and repeat-viewing ticket sales is disproportionately large. Any studio – and director – understands that it’s these people who make films profitable.
Not that we are endorsing a boycott.
For one, there’s something to be said for New Line having the fortitude to commission Jackson to make a three-film series and – pretty much on faith – commit $300 million to the project. It was a gamble that, perhaps, could have left the company in financial difficulty had the films flopped. Indeed, considering the recent outcry, they must be considering the fiscal impact of not having Jackson and his people involved, and weighing that against their lawsuit with Wingnut.
In Jackson, they have a known quantity.
They have someone who has a strong rapport with the Tolkien community. They have someone who welded together a team of some of the world’s most creative people who undoubtedly were the backbone of Lord of the Ring’s success. And they have someone who turned an ‘unfilmable’ classic into a multiple Academy Award winning monster.
Not only would a new director have to expend energy building trust with the Tolkien community, a new director would have to build the film-making team anew as well. How much harder would it be for someone to involve Alan Lee or John Howe? To encourage Andy Serkis or Ian McKellen to come aboard? To convince Hugo Weaving to reprise Elrond? Would WETA even be able to be involved? Richard Taylor says that he sees no barrier, but would New Line be as sanguine?
All these considerations mean that an unwise choice by New Line could be very costly.
For these reasons we still hold out hope that the vision that New Line Cinema Co-Chairmen Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne showed with Lord of the Rings will prevail with The Hobbit.
However, we know that there are many bitterly disappointed fans out there who *are* endorsing a boycott.
That’s your right – even if we might not agree with it.
The fact is, there are many views among Tolkien fans about what ought to happen with The Hobbit, and what ought to be done to make it happen. There are those who are pro Peter Jackson. There are those who don’t care and just want The Hobbit made soon. There are even those who want anyone BUT Peter Jackson to direct.
TheOneRing.net is home to all these perspectives.
Which is why, as an editorial team, we feel it’s our primary role to act as a facilitator and an information source. How you should act is for you: the fans, the readers, to decide, not for TheOneRing.net to dictate.
Like you, the fans, all of us at TheOneRing.net would dearly love to see JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit adapted into a film. And just like you, many of our staff hope to see Peter Jackson direct The Hobbit.
We don’t claim that another director couldn’t possibly do an amazing job with Tolkien’s tale. But we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate the same look and feel that Lord of the Rings possessed. And we know that many, many fans will be disappointed if Jackson isn’t allowed to ëfinish’ what he began.
New Line and MGM should keep the feelings of fans in mind. Because you, the fans, are also a part of this partnership who ultimately cannot be ignored.
– The Staff of TheOneRing.net
So what do you think of our editorial? Vote on our homepage poll or join the discussion on our forum.
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From Royd Tolkien:
I’ve had a bunch of people asking my opinion on the recent New Line / Peter Jackson / Hobbit news. These are my thoughts…
Before Peter made Lord Of The Rings all I knew of his work was that I really enjoyed his films. That all changed a few years ago. He’s not only a filmmaker, he’s someone that I now trust and respect.
Before the films were made I held massive reservations and fears that JRRT and LOTR would be used as merely a tool for producing revenue and would result ultimately in a substandard film. But it’s different now, and it’s different because of Peter.
3 weeks ago those feelings returned. Without him, The Hobbit will become what I had earlier feared LOTR was to become.
To find a new director after the time and dedication Peter and all his people put in would not just be wrong, it would also be a bad decision.
Now I know and understand that some purists would disagree with me, and whilst I again understand and agree with their right to have an opinion, just imagine how bad it could have been without Peter at the helm. Peter didn’t just direct a film, he brought together a highly impressive team.
Think about the different elements of his team; first there was the thoughtfulness and professionalism of Richard Taylor and everyone at Weta who realised the complex detail needed to make it believable; secondly the way Howard Shore’s beautiful music compliments and binds the film. In addition to this there is the wonderfully detailed concepts of Alan Lee and John Howe, both of whose insights helped craft the feel of the film. The fabulous costumes of Ngila Dickson, the photography and vision of Andrew Lesnie, and New Zealand, a country that lends itself perfectly to Middle Earth with its breathtaking and varied landscapes. All of these elements and many more were brought together by Peter.
How could a different director do what Peter has done? How would they find a similar team of people who have the knowledge, passion and understanding of a world they helped create?
Surely that doesn’t make any sense when Peter already holds the key.
I do understand and agree with Peter’s position, although I only know on the surface what must be a very difficult and frustrating decision for him.
I know it’s not simply a matter of saying yes. There’s a mountain of issues that lie between New Line and Peter, but there must be some way to resolve this.
I imagine there’s been an awful lot of letters and conversations between both camps, heels have been dug in and hair pulled out. If only there was some way to sort out the stalemate between them and find that common ground and resolution which is needed to do justice to such an important book.
Whilst I don’t know the inner relationship between New Line and Peter, what i do know is that they backed him, all those years ago, to produce LOTR. For that part and many more they played, I’m forever grateful.
When I saw the end result on screen, knowing that everyone had played a part in putting it there, and were all united in putting it there, it made me smile. I’m sorry but has everyone forgot those simple smiles? Isn’t that what making films is all about?
If Peter hadn’t made LOTR with the respect he showed to my Great Grandfather, I’d not have felt compelled to voice my opinion.
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There have been a slew of rumors going around that the online petitions, actor talkback, and fan protests have prompted New Line/MGM to rethink their plans and invite Peter Jackson back on The Hobbit. We at TORN can state unequivocally that there is no truth to these reports and Peter has not been contacted by New Line or anyone else in relation to the Hobbit… Does this mean he will never be contacted? Certainly not, we just want to clear up rumors to the contrary. The status quo remains the status quo…for now anyways!
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Tinuvielas writes: I just talked to editor Jochen Schuetze from the German magazine “Cinema” about the Saul Zaentz-interview (in the current issue) and about “The Hobbit”. According to him, the interview was given around October 15th when Zaentz was in Berlin.
Xoanon here, this interview was done well over a month before we released Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s letter, setting off a firestorm of controversy online and in Hollywood. My hope it to get Mr. Zaentz to comment now regarding this, in lieu of these new revelations!
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