splitting the hobbit into 3?

Is it me, or is it a little cool that its the FILM MAKER not the studio wanting to make it into 3 parts? I'm not a big fan of multiple part movies, but thats normally because its the studio milking our wallets.

I've never actually read the hobbit, but I was under the impressions that it was significantly shorter and had less content than the Lord of the Rings. Surely this would be a bad thing for the film if that was the case?

I mean, if I'm wrong, I don't mind it beocming a trilogy, because I absolutely love LOTR, but LOTR had three clear sections.

Personally I'm a bit skeptic about how well this would work out. If Peter Jackson wants to do it then I'm assuming it's doable, but the changes they'd have to make would surely be drastic. I guess they're talking about releasing An Unexpected Journey as planned and then splitting There and Back Again in two? You can't just slice a movie in half, pump in extra footage to increase the run time and then magically call it two movies. When you develop a film, you figure out how you want it to flow and get the character arcs figured out early on and then build the structure of the movie around that. For example, what would the second film do for a climax? You can't just take a battle scene from act 2 of the movie and then slap on "the end" after it. The end of a movie has to have a proper build up. It should feel like the character arcs have the right momentum going into some kind of resolution, otherwise audiences will be left scratching their heads thinking "wait, that was the end??" This is why if you want to make huge structural changes to a movie, you do it early in the planning phase and NOT AFTER YOU'VE WRAPPED SHOOTING. But then, maybe PJ was planning this way back and designed the script to be relatively easy to modify into three parts? It could possible work, but it seems like it would be so easy for the whole thing to turn into a hack sawed together mess. (That's my rant for the day.)

Its called editing people.