Are Movies Being Spread Too Thin?
Dominic piacentini
This coming winter, fantasy lovers will finally be able to see “The Hobbit” on the big screen, told in three parts. It’s interesting that a book shorter than “The Fellowship of the Ring” is receiving its own trilogy. Although Peter Jackson, director of the previous Middle Earth trilogy, claims he will be using additional material from within the appendixes, this still leaves many apprehensive. Has Jackson succumbed to the greed of Hollywood or does he genuinely believe this story is best told in three parts?
Jackson isn’t the first to split a single book into multiple movies. David Yates split “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” into parts 1 and 2, unleashing a new technique for book-to-movie adaptations. After this split was announced, production companies announced that “Breaking Dawn” would be split in half. The third book in the “Hunger Games” trilogy, “Mockingjay,” will also debut in two parts. It’s as though producers had been sitting on this idea for some time, but were too worried about public reaction until Harry Potter stepped up and did it. The split in “The Deathly Hallows” worked out well. Fans were happy that this lengthy book was well paced on screen. Characters like Dobby, Fleur and Bill were able to be reintroduced, and the battle of Hogwarts was an exact cinematic replica of the text. It’s hard to tell whether this would have been possible if all of the content was squeezed into a single movie.
So are Twilight and Hunger Games also justified in splitting their books? Considering I’ve never read or watched Twilight, I’ll move onto something I’m more interested in. Mockingjay, the third installment of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, is a considerably smaller book than “Deathly Hallows,” coming in at just 390 pages. I love the Hunger Games trilogy as a set; that being said, Mockingjay is the one I’d least like to see in two parts. I’m not sure why Lionsgate decided to do this. It could be this was a monetary strategy to get more bang for their buck, or it could be a way to better develop “Mockingjay’s” awkward pacing. With Suzanne Collins actively a part of production, I’ll hope that it’s the latter (but I’m not convinced).
However, Jackson is doing something even more drastic. He’s splitting a short novel into not two, but three parts. To give perspective, Jackson’s first Middle Earth trilogy covered 1008 pages. “The Hobbit” is 305. As Bilbo Baggins said himself, “The Hobbit” adaptations might, “feel… thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Based on casting news, we know that Jackson will be introducing characters that don’t exist in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and that actors from the “Lord of the Rings” will also be in this new hobbit trilogy: Elijah Wood (Frodo), Orlando Bloom (Legolas) and Ian Holm (Old Bilbo). What can we do but trust that Peter Jackson knows what he is doing? He gave us an incredible adaptation last time, and we have to assume that he’ll deliver again. In Jackson we trust.