Peter Jackson Definitely Wants To Make 'The Hobbit' A Trilogy And Talks Have Accelerated To Do So

It looks like Peter Jackson will be making a third Hobbit film after all. At least, that's what he's decided he wants to do, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In the past few days, logistical talks have "accelerated" between the director, his producing partners and Warner Bros., who would be open to the idea if the finances worked out.

Jackson suggested he'd be interested in a third film a couple weeks ago and has since been figuring out when the production would have to come back to do reshoots, how many of the actors would need to come back, when they'd need to come back, and how much all of that would cost. All of that is almost in order. Read more after the jump.

A source told The Hollywood Reporter that if a third film is to be made out of The Hobbit, a decision would have to be made soon but that talks "have accelerated in recent days, with the studio on board if the right financial arrangements can be achieved:"

If we're going to do it, we have to make a decision soon. It's strongly driven by the filmmakers' desire to tell more of the story.

Jackson has already told a lot of story. Besides three award-winning Lord of the Rings films set in J.R.R. Tolkien's universe, he released extended versions of each, and always aimed at turning the simpler prequel to those, The Hobbit, into two films (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is scheduled for release December 14 and The Hobbit: There and Back Again, will be out December 13, 2014. These plans would not change that time table).

If Warner Bros. decides everything looks good, additional filming would take place during the Summer of 2013 in New Zealand for about two months. There are apparently even some more rights issues that would have to be settled if this was to happen.

In a recent article on this over at Deadline, Jackson explained how he can take a book that's so short and make it not only two books, but three:

...we haven't just adapted The Hobbit; we've adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We've explained it using Tolkien's own notes. That helped inform the tone of the movie, because it allowed us to pull in material he wrote in The Lord of the Rings era and incorporate it with The Hobbit. So we kept the charm and the whimsy of the fairy tale quality through the characters. Through the dwarves and Bilbo, who is more of a humorous character. He doesn't try to be funny but we find him funny and find his predicament more amusing than that of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. That was more serious. So the whimsy is there, but tonally I wanted to make it as similar to The Lord of the Rings, because I wanted it to be possible for the people, the crazy people in the world who want to watch these films back to back one day...

It seems likely that if not by the end of this week, next week at the latest, we'll get official word if The Hobbit will two films or three. The latter is looking more and more likely, however.