@moonlit_centaur 

I remember reading somewhere that Tolkien said that The Lord of the Rings was actually one story. His publisher convinced him to have the story printed in three volumes since it was so long (over a thousand pages). He reluctantly agreed, but he always claimed it was one story even though it was in three physical books. It was his preference to consider the story as one long work. At least that is what it says in the introduction to my one volume edition. I wouldn’t go against what Tolkien said about his own work. The Lord of the Rings is not a real trilogy since it is not three separate tales but only one complete story. Tolkien never said that the book was a trilogy, and I think he was right.

@narnian78 

I didn't know that so thanks for the clarification. However my point still stands that it was published as 3 books so naturally makes sense to have been made into 3 movies.

@narnian78 the reason Lord of the Rings was not published and printed in one huge book was the shortage of paper in the early 50s (still post-war). It was also risky financially, as it was untested with the public. There are six books in the story (!) and each volume contains two.

It's definitely true that Tolkien intended The Lord of the Rings to be one book and he only split it into three volumes at his publisher's insistence. (Of course it's since been printed in one-volume editions, which was how I first read it.) However, I remember reading somewhere that Peter Jackson originally wanted to make only two films, covering the entire story within those, and apparently he took a fair bit of persuading before he agreed to make it into three films to correspond with the three volumes! I don't remember where I read that, but it certainly stood out to me, as most of what he did with those three films was very respectful to the books and I was quite surprised to learn he'd originally wanted to fit it all into only two movies.

Of course, what he did with The Hobbit was the complete opposite of respectful to the original book and I totally agree with @hermit that it was a blatant attempt to cash in, but let's just not go there... that was a crashing disappointment after the good job he did with the LOTR trilogy.

Back to Narnia and the purported eight films — having now read the NarniaWeb news article on the topic, I can only echo what @Varna has already said. Rich Gelfond himself said last month "And I think there are eight Narnia books..." (emphasis added), before this more recent comment of "I think there are like eight movies planned..."

It seems pretty obvious from what he has actually said and the way he phrased it both times. He's simply made a mistake on how many Narnia books there actually are, and seems aware that he has only a vague knowledge of the subject anyway. And of course, he's speaking as the CEO of IMAX, not as a Netflix employee, so it's extremely unlikely that he would have any kind of inside information from the production company. It sounds like he's simply getting excited at the thought of a major multi-film franchise for his own company to put on the (really) big screen and make money out of.

In other words, this whole breaking news story is about 99.99999% likely to be a big fat nothingburger.  

Posted by: @courtenay

In other words, this whole breaking news story is about 99.99999% likely to be a big fat nothingburger.

Absolutely spot-on.

In fact, NarniaWeb at first declined to even report on this story both times he's said it, since it was so super obvious what he meant, and it's clear from everything else he said what he actually knows about the production (i.e. very little)

However, rather annoyingly, as with the whole "Rock N Roll" thing, the rest of the internet news media decided to just uncritically run with the story, forcing our hands to comment on it with a news.post.

Such a shame that the more interesting news stories never seem to gain the same sort of traction online, what can you do.