[Brinniel]

Originally Posted by Laurinque

For personal reasons I think it would be hilarious I Tennant were cast is Bilbo - just imagine him short and wearing a waistcoat!

Tennant has denied any rumours about him playing Bilbo. Sorry to crush your dream of seeing the Doctor with furry feet.

IT WAS always rather unlikely that someone of David Tennant's height and build would end up playing the lead in Guillermo del Toro's two-part film of The Hobbit.

Rumours that the Doctor Who star was on a shortlist for the role surfaced earlier this month with talk that casting would be announced at San Diego Comic-Con.

But Peter Jackson, who is executive producing The Hobbit, said the production was several months way from hiring actors and made it clear there would be no casting news at the convention.

David Tennant has now denied any rumours that he will play Bilbo Baggins, telling MTV: "I'm a bit tall, aren't I? I know they do things with CGI now, but I'm 6'1". Hobbits are little. I do have quite hairy toes, though."

He added: "The internet is a curious place, isn't it? I think someone sits in their bedroom in Saskatchewan and comes up with an idea and they post it.

"And within minutes it's around the world and I'm getting phoned up by journalists and friends of mine saying, 'When are you off to shoot with Guillermo [del Toro]? It's not something I know anything about. No one's talked with me."

See the article here.

Originally Posted by Hakon

I think it will most likely be The Hobbit: Part One and The Hobbit: Part Two.

Yeah, that was just confirmed by PJ at ComicCon.

In an interview at Comic Con, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson spilled some interesting details about the status of the script for The Hobbit. He said the script for part one is about three weeks from completion. And everything — from casting to even getting a final green light from the studio — is still hanging on how that turns out.

He also explained in detail exactly why filmmakers decided that The Hobbit wouldn't all fit into a single movie:

We worked through the storyline, and we thought, "Well, obviously, we could squeeze The Hobbit into one movie," but even, like, a three-hour movie, you'd be amazed at how much of that story you'd have to lose. It's weird. I mean, the book ... is what the book is, and we just worked through a process of including all the events that we'd like to see in a film, and it was clear [that] it wasn't going to fit. Plus, the fact that we want to embellish a few things and put a little bit of extra ... narrative in for Gandalf and what he's doing in Dol Guldur and the Necromancer and various sort of side ... stories that are happening.

So, if all goes according to plan, we should get to see some pretty interesting scenes even beyond what was included in the book. A confrontation between Gandalf and the Necromancer before he has been exposed as Sauron could really turn out to be quite spectacular. There had been some speculation that the Gandalf/Necromancer storyline could be a key part of the plans for the (now abandoned) idea for a bridge film between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. It's good to see that the concept itself has not been wholly abandoned.

Article can be found here.

So no more LotR prequel. I think separating The Hobbit into two parts will work better than the original idea.