Source: Collider | Eye Crave | TheOneRing.Net
Steve Weintraub from Collider recently scored an interview with Peter Jackson at Comic-Con and got some information about the upcoming Blu-ray releases of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Extended Editions. Apparently they are coming next year!
The original theatrical cuts of the films on Blu-ray are already available for pre-order on Amazon.com for release some time later this year. Peter Jackson says the Blu-ray Extended Editions of the films will be a year later after that.
Jackson also says that the studio has not actually green-lit The Hobbit yet. What?! Guillermo Del Toro, Peter Jackson, and their crew are all working on the film, but it isn’t actually official that the films will get made. There is yet another pending lawsuit from the Tolkien family concerning profits from The Lord of the Rings films that could put the entire Hobbit project on hold, so I guess we’ll have to see if all their work (including reconstruction on Hobbiton) is for nothing.
I doubt that this project will be shut down. Perhaps delayed until everything is settled, but not shut down. This does make me furious, though. Can’t the Tolkiens just wait until after The Hobbit is finished?!!!! Can’t they just respect that and put greed aside? After all, it was New Line Cinema that made the decision that The Lord of the Rings films should be three films like the books are, instead of two like what was pitched originally. It was Peter Jackson and his team that brought this vision to life in such a way that brought in new fans of Tolkien’s story and also pleased most fans of the books. They treated the material with great respect, honoring Tolkien much more than anyone could have imagined. So what if some miscalculations were made? Settle it later and let The Hobbit get made. Or just quickly get it over with so as not to delay its release.
Update: Check out Peter Jackson’s info on The Hobbit from Comic-Con ’09! Here he talks about casting, the script and why The Hobbit has not been green-lit yet.
