Three Times The Hobbit?

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by alatar

By the by, why do we have to have 3? Why isn't 2 or 4 more frequent? LotR was split into 3 books. Oddly we had only 3 movies from the same . Star Wars (you may have heard of it) was a trilogy, and then the prequels were again the magic 3. Same with the X-Men and Spiderman arcs (not including spin-offs and reboots).

Well, as far as X-Men and Spiderman went, I think the Rule of Three has a lot to do with "the Third One Sucked," thus killing the franchise as it then-stood.

Beyond that, however, trilogies work for telling a longer story because stories are naturally and easily broken into three: beginning, middle, and ending. Of course, each story within a trilogy may have a beginning, middle, and ending (the Star Wars movies do, but the constituent parts of the LotR do not--because the LotR is only a trilogy through the happenstance of separated binding) but in the context of a trilogy the first part sets up the story (beginning), the second thickens the plot and generally leaves something big hanging, and the third wraps up the overarching story.

Extending that to four-plus increments generally means more than one "middle" and depending on how well things advance from one to two to three to four, could fall prey to a sense of being stuck or not moving along. If planned from the beginning to have four parts, that's as much a problem, but if you're making up parts as you go along (Star Wars) or dividing a single work into pieces (LotR) I suspect that would be harder to get right.