First official pictures arrive from the set of The Hobbit
The first official pictures from Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies have arrived, and they’re full of Hobbit-y goodness. Come and have a look!
If Peter Jackson’s intention was to get us all talking excitedly about his forthcoming pair of Hobbit movies with these first official pictures, well, mission accomplished.
The images may not show us anything we weren’t necessarily expecting - Martin Freeman looks perfectly Hobbit-y as Bilbo Baggins, and Sir Ian McKellan looks as sage and wizardlike as he ever did in his old role as Gandalf the Grey, but they’re nevertheless great to see, and hint at the same level of care and detail that made the Lord Of The Rings trilogy so eminently watchable.
And as Jackson has said himself over on Entertainment Weekly, who also brought us these pictures, these movies aren’t being cobbled together to make some quick cash out of Lord Of The Rings fanatics. While he’s only directing two movies instead of three, Jackson’s diptych of Hobbit stories will take almost as long to shoot as the Lord Of The Rings trilogy did.
“There's no way you can pace yourself for shoots like these,” Jackson revealed. “When we were going through the schedule for The Hobbit, I felt a terrible drop in my stomach when I saw that we'd be shooting for 254 days. We're only 12 days short of The Lord Of The Rings even though we're only doing two movies.”
Distressingly, we’ll have to wait for more than a year before we can see the first of Jackson’s films, with An Unexpected Journey not out until next December, and There And Back Again following on in December 2014.
In the meantime, feast your eyes on these glorious images - clicking on the thumbnails will make them enlarge, using some form of Tolkienesque Internet magic. Or something.
Entertainment Weekly
More news and stories about The Hobbit can be found here.
