In a hole in the ground, there lived … a film executive

New Line has decided to play chicken and make a Hobbit film without Peter Jackson.

You remember Peter Jackson … the guy who managed to pull off The Lord of the Rings in a way that got both fans and newcomers really excited and generated tons of money for New Line? Aw, who needs someone like that to direct the prequel? Especially since he refuses to cave on an auditing law suit he had against them …

From Peter Jackson himself:

A couple of months ago there was a flurry of Hobbit news in the media. MGM, who own a portion of the film rights in The Hobbit, publicly stated they wanted to make the film with us. It was a little weird at the time because nobody from New Line had ever spoken to us about making a film of The Hobbit and the media had some fun with that.

Within a week or two of those stories, our Manager Ken Kamins got a call from the co-president of New Line Cinema, Michael Lynne, who in essence told Ken that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make the Hobbit, because “that’s how these things are done”. Michael Lynne said we would stand to make much more money if we tied the lawsuit and the movie deal together and this may well be true, but it’s still the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.

Several years ago, Mark Ordesky told us that New Line have rights to make not just The Hobbit but a second “LOTR prequel”, covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR. Since then, we’ve always assumed that we would be asked to make The Hobbit and possibly this second film, back to back, as we did the original movies. We assumed that our lawsuit with the studio would come to a natural conclusion and we would then be free to discuss our ideas with the studio, get excited and jump on board. We’ve assumed
that we would possibly get started on development and design next year, whilst filming The Lovely Bones. We even had a meeting planned with MGM executives to talk through our schedule.

However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR ‘prequel’. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.

Or, as Solonor so quanitly headlines it, “New Line screws themselves out of more wads o’ cash.”

Now, it’s altogether possible that whatever Hobbit comes out of this will be perfectly viewable. It’s also possible that Jackson will eventually be brought back on board. But it’s also possible, even likely, that it will be much less than it might otherwise have been. Though, if worse comes to worse, we’ll always have the Rankin-Bass version.

UPDATE: And just to add three more thoughts:

1. Another LOTR “prequel?” One “covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR”? Shudder.
2. How many of the actors (let alone the other production houses that made a success of the trilogy and who could save NL tons o’ cash with existing fx files) will come on board without Peter Jackson? Sure, it’s a business thing, but for an effort of this magnitude, a lot of it also depends on personal relationships — and all the folks I heard interviewed indicated that Jackson was a major part of the relationships that brought and kept them on board.
3. I trust Jackson to make appropriate creative decisions and departures from the book in order to create a coherent story. I didn’t always agree with all of his decisions, but they all pretty much worked. From someone else, I fully expect to find Saruman (played by someone else) conspiring with Smaug, and Legolas (ditto) hanging out in the Wood Elves court and, oh, yeah, Gimli as one of the dwarves on the expedition …