[For updates, see “The Hobbit Film Project” category.]

By now everyone knows that New Line Cinema has settled out of court in the lawsuit Peter Jackson brought against it. The announcement of that settlement included the news that Jackson will produce The Hobbit.

Since then bits and pieces of additional information have surfaced in the news coverage, as reporters have contacted the main people involved for comments. I haven’t seen any source that pulls all that information together for a complete summary of what we currently know about the situation, so I’ll try to do that here, in one epic post. As always, I’m basing this on publicly available sources and my general knowledge of the background of the franchise as a whole. more »

Entertainment Weekly has a ranking of the top 25 fan websites, and TheOneRing.net is not only on it, but is up at number 6. Not bad for a site devoted to a trilogy that ended four years ago! Of course, now TORN is the go-to site for info on The Hobbit project, but I suspect the ranking was devised before the big news about that broke last week.

The TORN people were incredibly helpful when I was doing the research for The Frodo Franchise, and I’ve got a case study of the site in my chapters on LOTR and the internet. It’s great to see it getting this kind of recognition. Congratulations to the TORN team!

Over on Observations on film art and Film Art, I’ve just posted an entry about LOTR producer Barrie Osborne’s upcoming children’s fantasy, The Water Horse (being released on Christmas Day). I got to watch some of the sound mixing at Peter Jackson’s post-production facility Park Road Post during my visit to New Zealand this past May. In the entry, I talk about that and reminisce about watching sound mixing on Return of the King.

Naturally the settlement of Peter’s lawsuit against New Line Cinema and the news that he will be producing The Hobbit had to come while I was out of the country! I was in Italy, giving a paper at a conference and visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum. Exciting stuff, but it meant I didn’t have time to digest all the news coverage and write about the new situation.

That digestion got set back even more when on our way home my husband and I were delayed 24 hours by the big snow-rain-fog storm that has snarled air traffic in the Midwest this weekend. We got bussed from Minneapolis to Madison last night and arrived at 2 am. As soon as jet-lag and holiday activities permit, I’ll be posting a summary of the recent Hobbit-related events.

In the meantime, I notice that people are checking out my older entries about the Hobbit project and the New Line lawsuit. Some of the entries in the Hobbit Project category provide background information that might aid an understanding of what the lawsuit was all about.

A Conversation with Rick Porras, Part 3

For Part 1, see here; Part 2, here

The Question and Answer Session Continues

Q: He [Peter Jackson] also said something about re-doing the whole thing in 3-D. Is that possible? I mean financially.

RP: There’s a lot of different ways to do things these days. There are companies like Real-D, I think the name of the company is, that do have software that can turn a film that was originally shot in 2-D into 3-D. So you could do that. At one point there was talk about, can we do an Imax reel or whatever, but it ended up that we just didn’t have time. That would have been cool. That’s something that filmmakers are now doing more and more of. We did see the tests that Imax did with Apollo 13, I think was the first film they did that process, where they put 3-D into an Imax theater. That would be cool. more »