The Hobbit 's unexpected journey may be taking an extra twist or two after all, with Heat Vision reporting that Peter Jackson has entered into talks with Warner Bros as to the possibility of adding a third film to the two already in the can.
Jackson had already hinted at his plan for a trilogy at this year's Comic-Con , and now it seems as though the director has crystallised his ambitions, with producers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens already exploring the logistics of a third film.
According to Heat Vision , talks have gone well so far, with the studio reportedly on board conditional on financial arrangements proving agreeable. "If we're going to do it," says a source close to the production, "we have to make a decision soon. It's strongly driven by the filmmakers' desire to tell more of the story."
This being Jackson, the plan isn't simply to spread the original text more thinly across the three films, but instead to explore the book's various appendices, which include a number of characters and stories not included in the primary story. It's an approach that Jackson has already attempted to employ while filming the first two films.
"We haven’t just adapted The Hobbit ," he explains. "We’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We’ve explained it using Tolkien’s own notes. That helped inform the tone of the movie, because it allowed us to pull in material he wrote in the Lord Of The Rings era and incorporate it with The Hobbit ."
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in the UK on 14 December 2012.
