In an interview with Empire Magazine Philippa Boyens, one of the writers for The Hobbit trilogy, teases a bit about events in final film The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Not much is revealed, especially for anyone that has read the novel.

“I can legitimately say right now that the third film doesn’t exist,” [Philippa Boyens] stressed before the questions started rolling in. “Pete’s cutting it. As an entity, it’s coming together. Actually that’s not true - we have a rough assembly, so to speak, of the shape of the film and the performances. I am excited, because one of the storylines I care a lot about is the Thorin one."

“Richard Armitage is extraordinary, as Thorin descends into madness,” she said of The Hobbit: There And Back Again’s dwarfish denouement.

Asked about the reasons for that Lake-town cliffhanger, Boyens explained that as a “natural break” in the story it was “the most obvious place to end the second film”. She added: “It felt so natural that I got a shock when the audience got a shock! If you can imagine what transpires next and what’s coming, it’s quite a huge chunk of storytelling. Not only that, but you enter into the tone of the third film, which is very definitely - as is the book, by the way - moving towards the world of Middle-earth as it becomes in Lord Of The Rings. Some dark stuff goes on.”

And what of the dwarves' decision to make that most elementary of movie errors: splitting up? “We made that decision [so we would] experience the attack on Lake-town through the eyes of people we've come a long way with,” she said. “We wanted some of the dwarves to understand what happened in that firestorm, that holocaust that rains down upon Lake-town. Bofur (James Nesbitt) comes more into his own in the third film. A rift begins to open up. And I can’t say much more without going into spoilers for film three, but it’s primarily because we needed him to be there when the dragon attacks."

Phillippa Boyen Teases The Hobbit: There and Back Again. There are any Phillippa Boyen Teases The Hobbit: There and Back Again in here.