Hollywood's Hobbit will be big

One day in 1929, when J. R. R. Tolkien was doing the tedious academic job of marking examination papers at Oxford University, he saw that one student had left a page blank. On it, he wrote, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

Right there and then, a book, a bestseller, a legend and an entire industry were born. The next chapter is a two-part film of The Hobbit and it is expected that Peter Jackson, the mastermind of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, will be the director.

The film's budget has exploded  because of years of delays caused by legal disputes. Christopher Tolkien, the last surviving child of the author, claimed in a Los Angeles court that the Tolkien estate had been the victim of "Hollywood voodoo accounting" and was owed $150 million. He threatened to withdraw permission for The Hobbit unless the estate received a bigger share of the film's profits. According to the Daily Telegraph, an agreement has been reached and production is expected to begin soon. This means that the first part of The Hobbit will be in cinemas in December 2012, with the second following a year later.