"The Hobbit" is a single book, 310 pages in length.
"The Lord of the Rings" is three books, running 531 pages, 416 pages, and 624 pages.
Yet Peter Jackson adapted BOTH works in movie trilogies running over 8 hours. He clearly had to pad "The Hobbit" story MUCH more to give it the same length as LOTR. I'm optimistic about the movies getting the themes right but I'm worried into going to drag on forever with a ton of excess subplots that weren't in the books. For example, Frodo from LOTR is in the movie adaptation of "The Hobbit" when the character hadn't even been invented yet when the book version was written.
That is pathetic. They are just looking at the money to stretch that into 3 movies
As I understand it, Frodo is making an appearance, but only in the sense of allowing Bilbo to reminisce of those events from 70 years earlier. Frodo is not really in the movie in any real sense.
Jackson is drawing material from other Tolkien books. Hes not simply adding anything that wasn’t written by Tolkien’s hand.