Raimi Set to Direct Hobbit film?

Posted by Mister Hand (misterhand@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 13, 2007

Ryan ‘The Rican with the Irish name’ McLelland over at Latino Review says that the rumor that Sam Raimi is “the new Hobbit director is FACT rather than fiction”.

This rumor has been circulating awhile over at TheOneRing.net, but it now seems to be gathering force, like a dark cloud over Isengard.

I’m totally not buying it. Of all people, Sam Raimi should know full well that there’s only one person who can direct The Hobbit. And that is, obviously, Michael Bay.

Kidding, of course. Unless you want to see your Hobbits get blowed up real good.

Wait a minute. Let me mull that over.

Okay, watching Hobbits get blown from one end of the screen to another in anamorphic glory would be pretty awesome, but I think J.R.R. Tolkien would come back from the dead and spit the black bile of Mordor all over everyone involved. That, of course, as we all know, would lead to slow deaths for Bay and everyone else involved. Slow, agonizing deaths.

Which, again, might be pretty awesome.

But forget all that. Here’s my predictions for how the making of The Hobbit will shake out:

Coming off the success of Spider-Man 3, Raimi will be under pressure to do Spider-Man 4. If he turns that down, I doubt very seriously it will be so he can jump back into the mega-budget cauldron of another high-pressure geek franchise. And I think he will be more than a little reluctant to do so in Peter Jackson’s shadow. So Sam Raimi as Hobbit director? Never going to happen.

Peter Jackson is already well on his way toward mending fences with New Line following his lawsuit over profits from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Jackson will either direct the movie, or it will not be made. If it is made, it will be under the direction of some hack that New Line can hire on the cheap and pimp out like a ten-dollar crack whore.

I’ll give you three guesses who that director will be. And the first two don’t count.

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