District 9, which will be released in the U.S. on August 14, has been attracting a lot of attention recently. As most of you undoubtedly already know, it’s a horror film produced by Peter Jackson and directed by South African Neil Blomkamp. Yesterday Variety posted a favorable review. I spotted a number of my interviewees for The Frodo Franchise among the credits.

I don’t do a lot of coverage of Peter’s non-LOTR, non-Hobbit projects on this blog, but it did strike me that District 9 marks something of a turning point in the ongoing saga of the trilogy’s impact.

The Stone Street Studios

After all three parts had come out and Peter was making King Kong, there was a lot of speculation as to what he would do next. Would he have to keep making effects-heavy blockbusters to keep Weta’s digital and workshop halves busy? Or could that firm attract enough other business that Peter could make smaller-budget films and maybe produce young directors’ movies.

Then, in autumn of 2006, with Kong out of the way, it seemed that Peter was announcing new potential directorial and producing projects every week or two. There was a film adaptation of the Halo video game, an option on adaptation rights for the Temeraire novels, a Dambusters remake to be directed by storyboard artist Christian Rivers-all that in addition to The Lovely Bones, then in the scripting stage.

All that sounded like a very full plate, and I’m sure there were many who thought it a bit too ambitious. Very shortly after starting this blog, I summed it all up, basically in the context of trying to figure out whether PJ would have time to direct The Hobbit. At the time, my book hadn’t gone to press, and I thought perhaps I’d be able to end my final chapter with an announcement as to whether he would in fact direct it. Obviously I was overly optimistic about that!

Fast-forward nearly three years to the present. District 9 is the second feature film to be released that Peter has produced but not directed. (The first was Jack Brown Genius in 1992, directed by a New Zealander whose other credit is a making-of on Braindead.) It’s the first fruits of that ambitious post-Kong slate. True, Halo is gone, but PJ and Blomkamp decided to substitute a film based on an original screenplay. District 9 became a way to fill the Halo position. (In an interview on ign.com, Peter summarizes the Blomkamp connection.)

The rest of the planned projects are still alive, in various stages of planning. To them was added the three (or more) Tintin films, the first of which is going into post-production for a 2011 release. The Lovely Bones comes to us in December.

On top of all this, Weta Digital and Workshop are flourishing, appearing in the credits of films from a variety of countries-films that Peter is not directing or producing. In my book I talked about the immediate impact of LOTR: how it enabled Peter and his partners to build a world-class set of filmmaking facilities and gave a boost to the New Zealand film industry. When I finished the manuscript the question was, would it last, or would the trilogy’s impact dwindle?

I think that with District 9 and The Lovely Bones finally reaching the screen, we can answer that question and say that the changes wrought by LOTR are long-term. A filmmaking community based on cutting-edge technology is still flourishing, and Peter has lived up to the many comparisons of him to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, becoming one of the most influential producer/directors around. (Speaking of which, at Comic-Con James Cameron, a fairly influential person himself, reiterated his statement that seeing the amazing computer effects used to create Gollum made him decide to tackle get back into directing with Avatar.)

Of course, I never could have predicted the exact shape of Peter’s post-Rings career, but I’m happy to learn that my claim that the trilogy’s huge impact would linger is coming true!