The massive J.R.R. Tolkien novel was originally slated to span two films, but an announcement came last week that Warner Bros. planned to expand the franchise into a trilogy, allowing Jackson to explore both the book’s original text and the wealth of stories in the appendixes.
The only charitable reading of this very baffling passage that I can think of is to assume that this sentence was accidentally mashed together out of several sentences in revision, and that it wasn't read closely afterward.
