All three HOBBIT movies dated and given titles

With the decision taken to split the two Hobbit movies into three, a question mark was raised about how the films would be titled and when they would be released. Warner Brothers have now answered those questions.

The three movies will be called:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 14 December 2012
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - 13 December 2013
The Hobbit: There and Back Again - 18 July 2014

Interesting news, though to be honest I don't think the second title works that well. Even assuming the film's title comes from its conclusion (basically the end to the book, The Hobbit), that still doesn't seem to leave a lot of material for the third movie.

Whilst Jackson has repeatedly defended the decision to split the slim novel (less than one-third length the size of The Lord of the Rings) in three on the basis that there is material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings to mine, this claim has not withstood close scrutiny. The overwhelming majority of the appendix materials from Lord of the Rings are not suitable for filming (consisting of information on calendars, languages and timelines) and a lot of what's left over was already employed in the Rings trilogy (such as Aragorn and Arwen's relationship). A small amount of material on the dwarves from the appendix could be used for the Hobbit trilogy but little else. Most of Tolkien's writing connecting The Hobbit more firmly to The Lord of the Rings was published in Unfinished Tales, and Jackson and his team do not have the rights to use any material from that book. This suggests that the bulk of the material which will be used to inflate the slim novel into three two-hour (at least, presumably) movies will be the pure invention of Jackson and his co-writers, and considering how often such inventions were the weakest parts of the Rings trilogy, this is not a heartening prospect.