After having directed the hugely successful Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy and a remake of King Kong, which took him years to complete, Peter Jackson is set to do more.
Entertainment industry watchers are abuzz whether he will sign on to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to LOTR (also written by J.R.R. Tolkien). Jackson, who has considerably slimmed down from his hobbit-like girth while he was doing the Middle-earth trilogy, has often remarked in the past that he would welcome the chance to direct The Hobbit as soon as the studios can work out the legal tangle surrounding the film rights.
Barely a few days ago, MGM announced that it was planning to co-produce the LOTR prequel with New Line Cinema. MGM chief executive and chairman Harry Evans Sloan also disclosed that the studio intends to ask Jackson to direct it, although insiders from Jackson's camp said that they have not received a definite offer yet.
On the heels of this news was the confirmation that Peter Jackson had optioned the rights for a screen adaptation of Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" fantasy series. This 3-book (so far) saga is a revisionist tale about dragons being harnessed as an aerial force during the Napoleonic wars.
Before these two huge projects can move beyond the planning stage, however, New Zealand's favorite son is likely going to be preoccupied in the next two years. Jackson is set to produce a remake of The Dam Busters, which is based on a book by Paul Brickhill. This British WWII film, which originally starred Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd in 1954, is a true-to-life account of how Britain built bouncing bombs to destroy dams in Germany. The filmmaker is also set to direct the screen version of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones by 2007. Moreover, he has signed on as the executive producer of the game-to-film adaptation of Halo (Microsoft/Bungie), which is expected to come out in the middle of 2008.
