Future fantasy blockbusters based on the works of JRR Tolkien are unlikely to ever hit the big screen unless the iconic author’s estate mounts a dramatic U-turn on rights, Peter Jackson has said.
Speaking at a press conference in London a day after the world premiere of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the New Zealand film-maker confirmed the film was likely to be his final trip to Middle-earth.
“The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late 60s, the film rights,” Jackson said. “They are the only two works of his that have ever been sold … So without the co-operation of the Tolkien Estate, there can’t be any more films.”
While The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are by far Tolkien’s best-known fantasy works, the author also wrote numerous other stories about Middle-earth. The most famous is the posthumously published The Silmarillion, a collection of histories and tales written to flesh out Tolkien’s mythos prior to the time of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.
Ian McKellen, who plays the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, said at the premiere that he expected further films to be made in the future. Yet Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher is known to be extremely resistant to the idea.
“Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time,” he told Le Monde in 2012. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”
Jackson may not have helped matters by splitting The Hobbit, a breezy children’s fable, into three epic movies complete with numerous new characters not imagined by Tolkien. A bizarre “love interest” dynamic between the elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) has been seized upon by Tolkien fans as the worst example of the film-maker’s tinkering. There have also been legal battles between studio Warner Bros and the estate over moves to introduce Hobbit gambling machines, which are likely to have further poisoned the water.
Jackson, who won three Oscars for his work on 2003 Lord of the Rings movie The Return of the King, will now complete an extended three-hour DVD cut of The Battle of Five Armies, featuring half an hour’s worth of extra footage, before finally putting the book – and his time working on Tolkien adaptations – to bed.
• Gallery: final Hobbit film premiere
