Hopefully the second Middle Earth trilogy will be better than Star Wars II. Having waded through a lot of Tolkein's non-LOTR writings, there's more than enough plot material and characters to make a dozen movies. How you put all of the disconnected stories together, however, is another matter. What's strange, however, is that most of the additional writing is about events leading up to The Hobbit, (which leads up to LOTR), like where elves and wizards came from, who or what is Sauron or Morgoth, who made all the monsters, etc. It seems like you'd need several movies before you come to Bilbo unless it's all a lot of extended flashbacks. I'm not sure how all this will work, but I guess we will find out. I'll keep my fingers crossed, because it seems like a huge task that makes just telling The Hobbit story seem simple.
