Is This Really Peter Jackson's Last Middle-Earth Movie?

 By Joanna Crawley <http://www.entertainmentwise.com/  On December 3, 2014  

  The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the final piece in the puzzle
The release of The Hobbit : The Battle of the Five Armies next week signals the end of Peter Jackson 's 17 year journey with J.R.R Tolkien. Three Lord of the Rings movies and three Hobbit movies are in the can and Jackson's Middle-Earth adventure has been wrapped up into an epic six film series. But is there any way the director will return to Tolkien?

The Battle of the Five Armies will be released almost exactly 13 years after the first LOTR movie The Fellowship of the Ring hit cinemas. Billions have been made at the box office (The LOTR trilogy has notched up $2.9 billion alone), Orlando Bloom has had a steady run of work for over a decade and New Zealand has become a mecca for fans. After all these years is it really the end of the Jackson/Tolkien team-up? It looks like it.

At the London press conference for Five Armies this week, the director insisted that it was never in the plan for Tolkien's work to take over the last two decades of his life and ultimately become his cinematic legacy. "Fate steered me," he says, explaining that at the very beginning he had a much less epic plan for adapting Tolkien's works. "The very first phone call we made about these projects,  which was 17 years ago, I called Harvey Weinstein who we  first had a deal with and the pitch to Harvey was 'if you can get us the  rights to these books, we'd like to make The Hobbit as one film and if  it's successful then we'd like to do the LOTR as two movies.'"


Historically the New Zealand Government has shown contempt for the Works of Tolkien. Especially in the case of "The Lost Tolkien Mountains" of Fiordland. If they do not try and end some fences with Christopher Tolkien
he might as well get the Harry Potter People in the UK to do the other Tolkien Stories.