Third ‘Hobbit’ Film Confirmed, Based on ‘Lord of the Rings’ Source Material

If you seriously thought The Hobbit would only have one or two installments, then you don’t know Hollywood very well.

Director Peter Jackson has announced that despite it being based on one book (unlike its predecessor, The Lord of the Rings, which was already a trilogy of novels), his upcoming J.R.R. Tolkien project, The Hobbit, will be stretched into three films.

Jackson made the official announcement of the Hobbit trilogy Monday via Facebook.

“It is only at the end of a shoot that you finally get the chance to sit down and have a look at the film you have made,” his post explained. “Recently Fran [Walsh], Phil [Boyens] and I did just this when we watched for the first time an early cut of the first movie—and a large chunk of the second. We were really pleased with the way the story was coming together, in particular, the strength of the characters and the cast who have brought them to life. All of which gave rise to a simple question: do we take this chance to tell more of the tale? And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.’”

Jackson explained that much of the movie would be taken from outside source material, since The Hobbit only consisted of one book.

“We know how much of the story 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,” he said. “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 the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

He recently hinted to this possibility at the San Diego Comic-Con.

“There [are] other parts of the story we want to tell that we haven’t had a chance to tell yet,” Jackson said, according to Yahoo! Movies. “We have incredible source material with the appendices. Because The Hobbit is obviously the novel, but then we also have the rights to use 125 pages of additional notes that… expanded the world of The Hobbit that’s published at the end of Return of the King.”

Along with the source material being an exciting prospect for the director, it is also obvious that money is playing a large deciding factor, at least for Warner Bros.—after all, the Lord of the Rings trilogy grossed over $1 billion. Fans will likely be pleased as well, if only for the fact that the LotR saga will continue for much longer than expected.

“It has been an unexpected journey indeed, and in the words of Professor Tolkien himself, ‘a tale that grew in the telling,’” Jackson concluded his message.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, part one of the trilogy and prequel to Lord of the Rings, premieres December 14.

This article was originally published on AllMediaNY.com