Movie: The Hobbit
 

Fans of 'The Hobbit' take note: Film production has begun

"Cameras started rolling Monday on director Peter Jackson's production of "The
Hobbit," following months of delays on the prequel to his Oscar-winning "Lord of
the Rings" trilogy.

Hollywood studio funding problems, a threatened actors' boycott and ulcer
surgery for Jackson have plagued pre-production on the $500 million, two-movie
project.

The director posted a studio news release on his website Monday saying
production has commenced in New Zealand on the much-anticipated project."

See:

http://www.freep.com/article/2011032...yssey=nav|head

Let us hope it will be as good as we hope. THe Hobbit was a Children's novel after all, while the Lord of the Rings series was definately not.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/fullcredits#cast

I'm curious as to why Frodo, Legolas, etc are showing up in the cast list here....

And by curious, I mean dreading that they're going to screw with things...

Time to re-run the LotR films on my side now, For Great Justice :p altho knowing Frodo and Legolas in the cast is a scary thought indeed.

If I recall, there are suppose to be two films. One for the actual Hobbit and one to fill in the gap between the Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring (or maybe to look at the stuff only mentioned in the book...mainly the stuff Gandalf is doing).

Legolas isn't all that hard to throw into it. He's an elf and the Hobbit partly takes place in his kingdom and his father is a major kore character in the Hobbit. Elfs pretty much by default will be alive during the Hobbit since the ones running around were probably born thousands of years ago.

Frodo on the other hand. Well my guess is they might have him reading the story from Bilbo's pages. Or have him in the second film...since in the novel, Frodo and Bilbo have the same birthday...and Bilbo's 111th birthday I believe was also Frodo's 33rd birthday. (of course in the novel it is 17 or so years between that birthday and when Frodo leaves the Shire with the One Ring)

Oh so they're FINALLY doing it. XD I heard it kept getting shelved, then continued, then shelved....so this is in concrete, eh? I'll certainly see it. We know it HAS to be better than the animated version. I hated that as a kid and I still hate it now. XD Ralph Bakshi's style isn't really my cup of tea....though I did enjoy his Wizards. THEY KILLED FRITZ!:D

It's already been officially reported that they're going to use Elijah Wood as Frodo to read from Bilbo's writings as a kind of narrative device to tie things together - nothing new there. I'll withhold judgment on that until I see how it plays out on-screen, but it's nice to see Elijah back.

It makes sense that they use that framing device with Frodo - there is probably a large group who know of the series solely from the movies, and will need context to understand this is a 'prequel.' Anyways, my hopes are high for the movie. The Hobbit is my favorite Tolkien work, and The Lord of the Rings are probably my favorite movies.

Wow, PJ needed ulcer surgery? He seemed like a pretty relaxed guy.

So he's ended up directing it too now, right?

As long as it's better than this:




Watch 04:04 for bonus points


Which it probably will be, so I'm already sold to go watch the Hobit. :D

The original Trilogy was epic

Well, rats. I had kinda hoped this show would just slip away and never be made.

Not that I hated the LotR movies for what they were, but as adaptations of the LotR books (which I always really liked) I thought they were just horrible, so I had hoped "The Hobbit" would be spared. It's a much... smaller storyline in scope, though, so maybe it will make the transition a little better.

Yep. I was happy with Guillermo Del Toro - he would have presented an intriguing spin on the material - but he simply gave up due to the endless legal wrangling. Obviously Peter Jackson is the one guy you feel should have a handle on the material, so no complaints about the way things turned out.

I do hope Peter Jackson handles the Hobbit well. I was really looking forward to Guillermo Del Toro's unique directing skills in action!

I thought the LOTR movies were about as good as its ever going to get for an adaptation.... but yeah, still came short.

I think the Hobbit is an awkward book to begin with so I have no expectation for the movie.

I'm glad to hear that production is underway! 'The Hobbit' was one of my favorite books in high school, and will definetly see the movie.

Holy crap can"t wait for this!

I just hope it not 3 hours like King

Release in Dec. like all the rest

I'm rather curious as to how well the book will translate into film. For me, the book always seemed to have a rather odd pace to it that I don't really think would suit a movie.

I'm personally looking forward to 3 scenes: the trolls (and thus, Beater, Biter, and Sting); the arachnids; and "barrel-rider".

Barrel-Rider... WORST NICKNAME EVER... if you want to save people.

You can never fully make a direct book-to-movie film, because there are so many details in the books that you'd have to leave out to fit it in the timeslot and not rape the story at the same time. Jackson would've had to make the movies much longer to fit everything in and I think 3 hours for one movie (9 for all movies combined) was quite long as it was. And that's just the regular version we saw in the theaters, the Special Extended Editions added at least another hour to the movies' total time and even then, a lot of details from the books were not used.

Some fans will always stay pissed over him skipping certain details, or changing others, no matter how faithful to the books he eventually was. I'm sure this goes for The Hobbit as well, especially considering that Jackson wants to do it slightly different.

Anyway, I'm interested in seeing it.