Steuard's not the only one you should hide from! >_<

Woot.

Sounds like the "further sequel" will be basically The Hobbit, Part II. I can't imagine how they plan to squeeze two movies out of the one book, but you don't shoot two movies simultaneously unless it's basically the same characters, story, and setting (so it's unlikely to be the Silmarillion or anything like that). Maybe they plan to explicitly show the White Council/Necromancer/Dol Guldur business that was only alluded to in the book.

Awesome! Great news. Though yeah, I'm a bit nervous about the "further sequel" bit as well. I thought they already filmed the sequel to The Hobbit. :) Stretching the story into two movies could conceivably work, I guess, but they'd probably both be short. And where would you put the cut in the middle? There's no resolution in the story short of the Lonely Mountain, and especially if you wait for the death of Smaug that's just a few chapters away from the end of the book... chapters which, I might add, would only be valuable to the story as a direct followup to Smaug's death rather than as the start of another movie.

But the alternative is even more frightening: a movie set in the time between the books would probably both 1) require major extrapolations from the source material and 2) not have any especially clearly defined plot, climax, or resolution. Either of those issues individually could be made better, but only at the cost of making the other problem much worse. Unfortunately, I find it very unlikely that anyone would green light a film that was weak on #2, so wild extrapolations from Tolkien's Middle-earth seem pretty likely.

After all, once he's done the Hobbit he'll already have made movies of all the _important_ JRR Tolkien books! *runs and hides from steuard* ;)

Eh, I can't complain all that much as long as you replace "important" with "popular" or perhaps even "commercially viable". :) Maybe The Children of Hurin could work as a film, or someone could take a stab at adapting the tale of Beren and Luthien (or even a history of Gondolin: I've seen that suggested, and it's an intriguing thought). None of them would have the same level of cultural familiarity that LotR and The Hobbit do, though.

But it's really a moot point: the film rights to Tolkien's other books have never been sold, and from all I've heard they never will be (to put the nail in the coffin, Christopher wasn't too thrilled with the way the LotR movies came out). So no Silmarillion movies will be appearing until the copyright runs out, which current trends indicate will be between "after we retire" and "never".

You should see thegreatgonz's post debating how the making the one book into two movies would work. :)