Cracking the script for the second of the two planned Hobbit movies must not have been an easy task. With a wealth of Tolkien material available, Guillermo del Toro & Co. have plenty to work with. But now del Toro has told MTV that the secret to finding the identity of the second film was that the two movies are really one massive narrative. (Exactly like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

"The reality is that we stopped talking the first movie and second movie, and we just started taking about the movie - the two episodes, or two parts, as if they were a single piece of narrative," the director told MTV. "We don’t even call it the bridge movie, we just call it ‘The Movie.’ And this is great. When we found what reverberated, and we found it in one of our virtual meetings - we understood. It’s a movie."

That leads to a lot of questions, notably: will the first film encompass The Hobbit in its entirety, or will that (realtively self-contained) story be split among the two films? Del Toro says "I think Smaug dies in the first movie," which leads to the conclusion that the first film will indeed take on the meat of the novel. Of the second, he says, the most solid point right now is that it will lead right into the Peter Jackson film trilogy. Hopefully that means a last scene with Gandalf heading across the state line to pick up a bunch of fireworks and booze.