Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have been hard at work scripting not one, but two prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What we first heard was that there would be two movies and the first one would be based on The Hobbit.

This raised an interesting question: what would the second movie be? This question became more important when we started hearing that other JRR Tolkien texts had their rights based elsewhere, so it’s not like The Silmarillion and it’s tale of Middle Earth was up for grabs.

Lucky for us, director Guillermo del Toro is ready to shed a little light on what Hobbit 1&2 might look like…

From MTV:
“The reality is that we stopped talking the first movie and second movie, and we just started taking about the movie - the two episodes, or two parts, as if they were a single piece of narrative,” he said of scriptwriting meetings between “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson, his filmmaking team of Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and del Toro himself.

“We don’t even call it the bridge movie, we just call it ‘The Movie.’ And this is great. When we found what reverberated, and we found it in one of our virtual meetings - we understood. It’s a movie.”

[…]

“We all agree that if we do our job right, it should all feel like a continuous journey. That’s what we’re striving for,” Del Toro said. “You should see a movie that’s five pictures long. If we do our job right, you put in ‘The Hobbit’ and you wind up watching the entire Pentology!”

Okay, so one long Hobbit film is certainly exciting, but where is one movie going to split into another? Are we only going to get a painful cliffhanger at the end of Part One (2011)?

“We are finding out,” GDT continued. “I think Smaug dies in the first movie. So draw your own conclusions.”

We refuse to draw our own conclusions! Tell us more!