@Stitch the problem isn't that people are losing interest in middle earth it is just that they took something that should have been 2 movies and turned it into 3. Even that might have been forgiven if the expansions they had made had been halfway decent.
And then they added a female...
@Batman that is a lot to respond to so I'll just try to sum it all up simply.
About the 12 History books: Indeed a lot of it is notes and a lot of it goes against established cannon however it opens up a great deal of possibilities and as you said the works were only compiled by his son and...
Oh there will be more movies, thinking otherwise is just silly. The Tolkien family does own the rights and they have currently refused to sell them but that is only because they done goof'd and sold the rights to Lotr and the Hobbit for cheap and didn't make anything off them. So it is literally...
So evidently most people are not aware of this but Tolkien did not write just lotr and the hobbit he also wrote 12 books just about the history of middle earth totaling 3,500 pages... But there are also several other books he wrote:
Bilbo's Last song - poem about what happens after Biblo leaves...