The Tolkien heirs still have the rights to the Silmarillion and are not inclined to give them up. They refused Jackson the rights to use any material from it in the Hobbit. To make a film of it would require even more dramatic license to be taken by the director than The Hobbit. JRR Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion, it is essentially an outline that his son published after his death. It has none of the friendly narrative of LOTR or the Hobbit. It is full of difficult names, lineages, who-begat-who, ancient tales, and poetry. It is like reading the Bible. And no one ever made a Bible film that didn't take huge license with the original text.
Dear god I hope not. I could maybe see them doing the Children of Hurin, but the Silmarillion is so choppy I'm not sure it would translate. Especially The Ainulindale, or music of the Ainur. It covers such a broad amount of time there is no way to do it without ruining it. As I said maybe the Children of Hurin, maybe the flight of the Noldor. Some of the stuff that's in the Hobbit movies is taken from the Silmarillion. All I know is Christopher Tolkien's wishes are that the Silmarillion never be turned into a movie, his son Adam I think feels the same. Tolkien hates these movies because they are so butchered and he knows more about middle earth than any living person. While it would be cool to see Melkor, or Feanor, Finwe, Fingolfin's battle with the Balrog, so many small stories that make up the Silmarillion, Beren and Luthien, Thingol, the creation of the naugrim, ungoliant, I don't think anyone could ever do it justice. I'll tell you what is cool though, get really stoned and listen to Marin Shaw do the audiobook. Hours of entertainment.
Absolutely. I have some weekdays off now and I can go catch the high-res, 3-D version in the afternoon in an almost deserted theater. Tolkien is an acquired taste and not a good film for a date anyway. Well, he doesn't know jack shit about making movies. If every word from LOTR was used, the movie would be 53 hours long. Movies are not like books, you can't sit it down and come back to it later. You can't go back and re-read a page to look up minor characters, you can't have the omniscient third-person narration, you can't let it plod along for a couple of hours to a movie audience, you can't confuse them with side-stories and histories of the elder days. A movie does not have an appendix or an index. It has to move along swiftly and not confuse an audience with hundreds of odd names and dozens of flashbacks to a thousand years previously. A novel--any novel--must be adapted ruthlessly if the movie is to be as good as the book.
Yep I'll be back in theaters for the last installment, I wanna see how he wraps up with the Silmarillion stuff, and the battle of the 5 armies is one of the most epic battles in literature, I can't wait to see that as well.
What annoyed me most was what I heard from director commentary... Plot points were changed to satisfy actor egos.... Oh, and Legolas and Hus damn skateboard... And Gimli being made a Falstaff instead of the badass he is in the books...
