Primarily because they are bringing back Orlando Bloom who's character does not appear in the Hobbit.

Oh, I'm sure they are stretching it out quite a bit (perhaps even having wrong Lothlorien elves hanging out at Rivendell by chance). But the subtitle of the second film is "There and Back Again," which much more strongly implies the conclusion of Bilbo's adventures in The Hobbit.

Oh well, we'll see. I rather like your notion better, Moonliner - because I think splitting this small tale into two separate admission films, released a year apart at that, is a wee bit retarded ... and, ya know, craven.

A couple of years ago, when The Hobbit was going to be a Benecio Del Toro movie, the press indicated that it would be first movie - The Hobbit, second movie, interim stuff that leads up to the trilogy. Now that it's back to Peter Jackson, he says it's really just The Hobbit, in two parts. So, it's going to be ridiculously padded, sounds like.

But the most important question is...Is Aragon and his scruffy hotness going to be back?

If Peter Jackson is involved in making it, my interest is hovering somewhere around a medium negative number.

If you were curious what The Hangover would have been like it if were simply mean-spirited and all the funny had been removed, go see The Hangover, Part II (which is weird, because I thought Due Date was The Hangover with the funny removed).

And yet, apparently adding mean and subtracting funny, oh and of course adding the label "II" gets you the biggest 5-day holiday weekend opening in cinema history. Sheesh.

Sounds like someone knew they had a bomb on their hands and released it to as many screens as possible. Unless of course it continues to play strong this week in which case people are just weird.

I don't know that it's a bomb. I seems, from all I've heard, to be a total remake, but without everything that made the first one fantastic. Perfect sequel formula. Idiots everywhere eat it up.