It seems like it’s pretty much always been the plan to have The Hobbit bleed into The Fellowship of the Ring, creating two earnest prequel movies for the giant trilogy. However, Drew McWeeny over at HitFix is right to point out how fascinating the speed of information is coming these days about projects like this.
Ian Holm will be returning in his role as Bilbo Baggins which either means Peter Jackson is bravely making Bilbo an elderly man battling dragons (and Martin Freeman is just a decoy) or that we’ll get some degree of bookending with Holm bouncing Elijah Wood on his knee.
Maybe the film will open with the storyteller, maybe it will simply close, but at this point, the most fascinating mystery left is the possibility that we’re reading casting news that we might not get to experience on screen until over 2 years from now (when the second installment comes out). Of course, he might very well be in the first installment, too, but can’t we at least pretend to have a few unknowns since the movies haven’t even finished filming?
