Warner Bros. has announced that the final film in The Hobbit trilogy, There and Back Again, will move to December 17, 2014 from its previous July 2014 spot.

The decision, initially reported by Deadline, was apparently made to avoid going up against Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Perhaps Jackson and his team could appreciate some additional time to complete the film, too.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens December 13, 2013. An Unexpected Journey premiered on December 17, 2012, and its DVD/Blu-ray will be released on March 22. Check out the special features.

The Hobbit was initially a pair of films until Peter Jackson and Warner Bros. decided to split it into three parts this past July. “We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance [to make it a trilogy],” said Jackson at the time. “The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

Bad news, good news, or is everyone impartial? Since Warner Bros. gave us so much notice about this delay (unlike when they pushed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), this one won’t come as too disappointing.