Over eight grueling years, Peter Jackson turned J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings into a multibillion-dollar franchise. So you'd think that New Line, the studio that financed the LOTR juggernaut (and an EW sister company), would have long since locked up plans to adapt The Hobbit, Tolkien's juvenile-flavored preamble to the trilogy. But a long-simmering rights imbroglio has precluded the movie from coming to fruition — by Jackson or anyone else. Happily, that conflict seemed to be...