Those hobbit-loving nerds at Ain't It Cool have the news:
New Line, MGM, and Warner Brothers have announced that Peter Jackson's Hobbit films are titled The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, to be released December 14, 2012, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again, to be released December 13, 2013.
The titles are very much from the books, and appropriate for the films, I'd say. So much of the cast from The Lord of the Rings is returning—some of them who weren't in The Hobbit originally, but I trust Peter Jackson and I think he'll make the characters work in these films.
I trusted Peter Jackson before The Lovely Bones made me want to shout "FIRE!" in the theater, preferably after starting an actual fire so that the print of Lovely Bones would be destroyed. It doesn't help that despite my deep, deep Lord of the Rings nerdiness, I can't shake the feeling that this second Hobbit movie—which is supposed to bridge the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—is gonna be nothing than a bland cash-in ("And then Aragorn... y'know... strode around for... a while."). Well, that, and the versions Guillermo Del Toro was working on before he left the project sounded awesome. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll be magical. Or maybe it'll be a mystery. BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!