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Peter Jackson Announces Plans for 72-Part Movie Series of The Silmarillion

Hollywood, CA–At a press conference today outside his estate in Beverly Hills, acclaimed director Peter Jackson announced his plans to make a 72-film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. “It was the next logical step after doing Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit,” Jackson said. “In Lord of the Rings, we took over a thousand pages of novel and adapted it to the big screen in three extremely long films. Then in The Hobbit, we took a children’s book a fraction the length of Lord of the Rings, and also made it into three extremely long films.”

Jackson then unfolded his plan for Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which begins with a mythological account of the creation of Middle Earth and culminates in the great battles of the Elves during the First Age. “The first film in the series is set to come out in Summer 2016. Then, every two years from 2018 to 2160, the following installment will be released.”

Returning to the original cinematic backgrounds of the Lord of the Rings movies, Jackson made an executive decision to save costs for shooting the outdoor scenes, and had his studio purchase the entire island of New Zealand. “In the long run it will cost us a lot less. Plus, now the citizens of New Zealand are the property of our studio, so we get free labor to build sets.”

Movie buffs and Tolkien nerds alike are ecstatic over the news, and Jackson, as usual, is enjoying the attention, teasing them about the contents of some of the 72 movies they can look forward to. “16 of the movies will be almost exclusively footage of the elven-folk doing various dances, and I don’t want to say much, but The Silmarillion: Part 49 is subtitled Gandalf Smokes his Pipe.”