Though we’re still five months away from the December 14th release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to The Lord of the Rings series, and a year and a half from its follow-up, The Hobbit: There and Back Again (out December 13, 2014), Jackson is already talking about expanding the prequel series into a third flick with Warner Bros. Jackson has previously stated he was interested in devising a third flick in the Hobbit series in order to craft a third trilogy of flicks within the Lord of the Rings universe, “and has since been figuring out when the production would have to come back to do reshoots, how many of the actors would need to come back, when they’d need to come back, and how much all of that would cost.”

Apparently, if a third Hobbit flick is to be made, Warner Bros. wants the decision to be made soon, with talks having “accelerated” recently, as the studio is looking to jump on board “if the right financial arrangements can be achieved.”

If Warner Bros. gives the green light, additional filming to craft a third Hobbit flick would take place in the summer of 2013 in New Zealand for approximately two months.  Jackson recently spoke out about he could take a relatively short book like The Hobbit and expand into not only two, but three flicks total:

…we haven’t just adapted The Hobbit; we’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together.

The flick 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.

So we kept the charm and the whimsy of the fairy tale quality through the characters.

Through the dwarves and Bilbo, who is more of a humorous character.

He doesn’t try to be funny but we find him funny and find his predicament more amusing than that of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.

That was more serious.

So the whimsy is there, but tonally I wanted to make it as similar to The Lord of the Rings, because I wanted it to be possible for the people, the crazy people in the world who want to watch these flicks back to back one day…

/Film predicts that the confirmation/ denial of a third Hobbit flick will be announced by the end of this week.

What do you think—should Jackson expand his LOTR universe even further?

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