If you own any of the “Lord of the Rings” films on DVD or Blu-ray then you’re probably just as likely to own the extended editions as you are the standard editions. In fact, there are probably few extended versions of films that have sold/been accepted quite as well as Jackson’s extended trilogy. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is due in theatres in December, and it should come as no surprise that Peter Jackson will also be offering an extended version of that film on home video towards the end of 2013.
We probably shouldn’t have ever expected anything else, but when Jackson announced that the two films were to become three there was a school of thought that a lot of the extra material from the first two films would be mined for the extra one. We would be surprised if these editions end up quite as extended as a result, but it’s still encouraging that Jackson thinks he has so much decent material that he can not only deliver three movies with the source material he has – but that he can extend them all too.
The quality of the final product remains to be seen, and there are certainly a lot of skeptics. Jackson doesn’t have the rights to all of Tolkien’s material ("The Silmarillion" and "Unfinished Tales" for example) so he’s mining the appendices from both "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" instead. We imagine there will also be a lot of original material in the screenplay too. We’ll find out how the first installment fares when it hits theatres on December 14th, and let’s not forget that the odds seemed stacked against Peter Jackson before "Lord of the Rings" too. And oh yeah, here are some new banners for the movie too. [Collider/FirstShowing]
