The sudden death of Peter Jackson, who was regarded as the “Shakespeare of the 21st century” was a big impact to the Australian, Hawaiian, and New Zealander filming industries due to the fact Jackson himself was very well known by everyone in filming for his role in the creation of the famous movies Heavenly Creatures (1994), Frighteners (1996), and his last successful movie he directed Crossing the Line (2008). After finishing Crossing the Line, Jackson later went public and announced he was taking a break from filming and acting due to having gone through a nasty divorce with his wife who he been originally with 27 years.
The divorce put a colossal amount of stress on Jackson that the people who worked with him during Crossing the Line had notices plenty of changes in his behavior such as verbal outbursts over minor mistakes, failure to show up to begin filming on some days, and often many of his friends who known him for years have reported that Peter himself began to become addicted to painkillers in which Peter himself stated he need it “to get rid of the pain”. Mostly likely the pain of which being the heartbreaking divorce Jackson was experiencing at the time. He really loved his wife and had trusted her only to be betrayed in the very end when Jackson found out his spouse was cheating on him with another man, albeit a co-worker.
When Jackson told the public in 2008 about him taking a break from the film industry many people felt sorrow for him showing their sympathies. To see the most famous film director in recent times become a shell of his former self was a heartbreaking experience for many. But of course it turns out that the lesson here that Jackson learned was that it doesn’t matter if your rich and famous and well-liked by everyone, because people can and will still betray you in the end when you don’t expect it.
And Jackson learned that the hard way.
During the rest of the years that Jackson remained on a low public profile, he began to live by himself in his Auckland fancy house, in which friends reported to public that he would end up not bothering to leave his own home for days and for a total of two years he literally never step foot outside of his home.
Eventually when things were looking good, the New Zealander film director in 2019 came back to the public spotlight where he announced he is coming back into the film industry and that he plans on creating a movie based on the Lord of the Rings series made by J.R.R. Tolkien. In many interviews Jackson stated he will dedicate more of his life in making the Lord of the Rings books in exact order this time as motion pictures. Thus Jackson stated that he had began working on developing a movie based on the novel, The Hobbit which was released in December 2020, since the filming itself took a two year period due to getting certain locations in the world to be used to see how the world of Middle Earth would look like.
Thus for much of 2019, Jackson and his crew traveled to Victoria, Switzerland, Austria, and many parts of New Zealand to film shots that resembles the locations in Middle Earth.
But of course by the time the filming was complete in June 2020, Jackson had very high hopes on getting back to his higher status in the world of filming. Therefore he knew that The Hobbit was going to be a success in the box-office across the ANZC and even South America since he had high hopes of gaining a cult following in Brazil. However though it came with a unforeseeable cost.
A cost that costed his own life.
That was when Peter Jackson went on the Malaysian passenger plane, Malaysian Airlines Flight 41 where he was arriving home to New Zealand after visiting a friend of his who lived in Morocco. On that fateful day of August 11th, 2020, the plane was shot down by supporters of the Hamas Caliphate in the former nation of Libya.
All on-board perished except only three children survived the terrorist attack.
However Jackson did not, for he had perished along with the majority of the passengers on board, along with two famous celebrities from Malaysia.
The death of Peter Jackson sent shock-waves across the ANZC as many people were heartbroken to have lost an important great film director. New Zealand itself had four days of mourning in memory for Jackson.
And with the sudden death of Jackson, many began to wonder what was to become of his planned movie series based on Lord of the Rings. And sadly it never came to be due to his unfair and unexpected death.
As a result the only film ever released in his planned franchise was The Hobbit which was released on schedule around Christmas of 2020. As a result the film was released in memory of Jackson as it showed clips of Jackson happily interacting with his cast and co-workers after the credits before showing text saying “In memory of Peter Jackson, a man who we will truly miss...”. Thankfully though The Hobbit was a box-office success having a total of 50 million people viewing it when it first aired in theaters across the ANZC and South America, thus it managed to still be a success even long after Jackson was gone.
However even though The Hobbit was a great success as Jackson expected it to be, his planned movie series on the Lord of the Rings franchise never came to be.
-Peter Jackson: The Shakespeare of the 21st Century, a documentary about the famous New Zealander film director, February 20th, 2045
