New Line Cinema, the studio that brought us the classic Dumb and Dumber and then decided years later to make a prequel, Dumb and Dumberer without any of the original talent has done it again. In fact, they have topped themselves. The studio who brought us my favorite films of all time, Peter Jackson’s vision of The Lord of the Rings, has decided that they do not need Jackson or his creative team to make The Hobbit or another prequel that was in the works, though I’m not sure on what text the other prequel would be based. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh detail their side of the story in an open letter to their fans over at TheOneRing.Net. The following quotation sums up the looming debacle. “However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken [Kamins (Jackson and Walsh’s manager)] and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR ‘prequel’. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.”

Talk about hubris on New Line’s part. The Lord of the Rings films worked in large part due to the great source material J. R. R. Tolkien provided, but the adaptation to the screen could have failed miserably in the wrong hands. Jackson and his team made the right choices and have a proven track record with the material—$2.92 billion in box office receipts and 17 Academy Awards (according to the Wikipedia entry). Who is to say that the next team will do half as well?

For what it’s worth, I think that The Hobbit would make a great HBO series like From the Earth to the Moon or Band of Brothers. The Hobbit has an episodic structure and each chapter is basically its own self-contained adventure. It would make for a series of great one-hour episodes.