in the name of Mahal, Elbereth Gilthoniel, and all else that is holy: NOPE.

[martasfic]

(ETA: Lin found a piece at TORN that pretty thoroughly rebukes this. See our exchange in the comments for more.)

There's a report making its way around the interwebs today with lots of spoilers for the third Hobbit movie. One version is available here:

http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/the-hobbit-3-spoilers-details-about-the-battle-of-five-armies-24895

To which I can only say:

1. Please tell me that Ecumenical News is some sort of a parody site, or copying this from the same.

2. Please tell me Peter Jackson isn't going to burn my favorite characters once again. I mean, it took me the better part of a decade to get over Denethor.

3. Please tell me he isn't this stupid. I mean, is Fran okay? I'd expect her at least to keep her better half from this nonsense, she always seemed to know the books.

Without going into the spoilers specifically, if the changes described here are accurate, the fact that PJ can even contemplate them shows a frankly stunning disregard for what JRRT was trying to do in those final chapters. If these spoilers turn out to be true, I suspect this movie will have as much to do with the final third of The Hobbit as the Bakshi Brothers' "adaptation" did with The Lord of the Rings. I was planning on seeing it because I'm a Tolkien fangirl and that just seemed like what we did, and also because Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman have been consistently excellent and this version of Smaug has quite literally taken my breath away. But if this is the direction they're going, I must say my drive to see it has pretty much evaporated.

Comments

[lin4gondor.livejournal.com]

There's a pretty good article HERE that IMHO pretty much debunks that rumor.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that. I'm a bit ashamed I was taken in, as I usually have better clickbait RADAR than I managed on this one.

The sad thing I think is that the Hobbit movies have been pretty intensely disappointing to me because they seem to have lost the airy tale aspect of the story and its optimism in lieu of big explosions. It no longer feels like the same story as what I enjoyed in the book, so I don't have the trust to feel confident they wouldn't do anything like this, I guess. Sorry to have panicked this time, though.

[lin4gondor.livejournal.com]

Some of the changes made to our favorite characters in the past definitely make it possible to believe such rumors, or at least to be worried they might be true. I'm glad I read the TORN article first, I think I might have had some doubt myself otherwise!

[dreamflower]

Yeah, I might have been taken in if I hadn't seen TORN first.

There is actually a petition online to try to get PJ to spare Thorin! This doesn't surprise me.

There was a post on TORN about things we were hoping to see in the third movie, and I had the following exchange:


Me:
"There is only one make-or-break scene so far as I am concerned: Bilbo passing on the Arkenstone. That moment is the high point of Bilbo's character arc, as he passes the Stone on in the hopes of making peace.
Other scenes I look forward to:
Thorin's dying scene with Bilbo.
Bard shooting Smaug
Beorn in the Bo5A
The White Council casting down Dol Goldur"

Other person:
"Why would you look forward to see Thorin death,if he dies the whole movie is for nothing"

Me:
"Uh, no. It would not be "for nothing". It will be the logical conclusion to Thorin's own character arc.
It's going to happen anyway; it happened in the book, it will happen in the movie (just like Boromir's death in FotR and Théoden's death in RotK). In spite of what some people think, the main character in The Hobbit is...the hobbit. I don't look forward to Thorin being dead (it's very sad). I DO look forward to seeing that scene played out with Bilbo and to the emotional resonance of the scene. I can imagine how well it will be played out with the acting skills of Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage, and fully expect to weep buckets if it's done right."</i