Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson announced with New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios that they will begin production of a movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. New Line Cinema, the production studio responsible for the hugely successful trilogy based on Tolkien’s masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, (and strangely, also for the recent adaptation of The Golden Compass by militant atheist Phillip Pullman), has recently settled litigation with Jackson regarding pending payments from The Fellowship of the Ring.

For current information on The Hobbit, check the official site, The Hobbit Blog, and the unofficial fan site, The Hobbit Movie.com. For more information on The Lord of the Rings, see The Lord of the Rings site by Houghton Mifflin Publishers.