Five Possible Reasons that The Hobbit is Spilling Over into a Third Movie KELSEY ANN BARRETT (TOR.COM) Via SCOOP IT

Okay, we know that The Lord of the Rings movies were long, especially with the extended versions, but Peter Jackson still managed to keep each single book down to a single corresponding film. So why, then, can he not even fit The Hobbit into two movies, but has to make it three? I have a few theories

1) The Necromancer


In the book, we don’t get to see where Gandalf goes off to when he abandons Thorin and Company on the edge of Mirkwood, but we know from the LotR appendices and some of Tolkien’s notes that the wizard left to lead an assault upon the Necromancer in his lair at Dol Guldur, in the heart of Mirkwood. Mirkwood wasn’t always called Mirkwood, after all—it used to be Greenwood the Great, and it was only after the Necromancer’s arrival and the result of his influence there that the elves renamed the forest Mirkwood. That was when it became the dangerous place that the dwarves and Bilbo had to travel through.

We’ve seen clips in the trailer of Gandalf wandering carefully through some creepy gray stone ruins, and one has to assume that there will be a big confrontation between him and the Necromancer. (Possibly in the tradition of that epic Gandalf v. Saruman smackdown in Fellowship? Or something even more terrifying?) The fact that Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Smaug makes it logical to cast him in another voice-acting role within the movie (just as John Rhys-Davies played Gimli and voiced Treebeard) but once you have that voice and that talent, why not use it to its fullest? Will we see only one scene with the Necromancer, or will there be several? Is the scene we’ve glimpsed in the trailer that first time Gandalf snuck into Dol Guldur (no one knew who the Necromancer really was—although the Wise suspected it was one of the Nazgul—until Gandalf snuck in and discovered that it was actually Sauron) and is it possible that we may also see the battle itself, with all the strength of the elves and wizards thrown against the growing shadow of Sauron?

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