The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

martin freeman doing well for the ol' Postwar British Comedy scoreboard between arthur dent and bilbo. he should go oscar with money or something.

(totally looking forward to this though)

xpost

Let's not forget that he's Dr. Watson too!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13599286

Sir Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood will reprise their roles as Gandalf the Grey and Frodo respectively.

??? Was Frodo even born during the events of Hobbit? Or will the movies include an epilogue with Frodo or something?

Yeah some sort of framing thing.

I think Frodo is seen during a song and dance number with Smaug called "Don't be takin' my treasure/My precious Ring(reprise)"

There's gonna be a heck of a lot padding in these things

please God no long drawn out scenes with enya in the background and Hobbits sniffling and hugging

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20504849,00.html#20980350

http://www-images.theonering.org/torwp/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Dori-Nori-and-Ori.jpg

^ dwarves, not Hobbits, obv

Ugh.

So, in this period of Middle Earth, dwarves are made of plastic?

They're related to garden gnomes.

nice to see he's using a lighter touch this time. subtly done, those plastic midgets

god i need to remind myself to stop opening up "anticipating" threads

haha max

is this whole movie gonna be short people? if so they should only charge half price.

quarter price, since they're gonna split this movie into two parts

I had troll dolls that looked more convincingly human.

but they're not human, they're dwarfs, do you see???

wasn't the cartoon hobbit only 1 1/2 hours? i thought they captured everything necessary in that, and even padded it with songs. i totally don't get why this is gonna be 2 movies, and am a bit worried now!

Entirely my concern! Should be a nice lighthearted prologue to the overblown Lord of the Rings.

even the flimsiest novella can be adapted for the screen into two 3-hour movies -- the material is there, they may as well shoot as much of it as they want

But they are putting in loads of stuff that isn't in the book.

eh, i kinda disagree. i mean i'd be happy to be proved wrong by the movie itself - if it's 6 hours of film in 2 sittings and it all rocks, ok, great, i take it all back! but i feel like the hobbit's a fairly concise story, and filling it out into 2 long movies is kinda stretching it out more than is strictly necessary. i mean, are they really gonna put Gandalf's Adventures Somewhere Completely Different in the middle of the frikkin hobbit? frankly i'm worried.

the lord of the rings was overblown, but that's kinda it's charm. and yet how muchm of the books (not to mention filmed footage) did they have to excise to make it a compelling narrative? don't get me wrong, i'm not complaining, i thought the movies were great - enjoyed every minute. but they really couldn't have been a millisecond longer without starting to bore me.

the hobbit needs no new material - it's perfectly written to be transformed to a single feature length film. god, is this the studios pressuring (or even just encouraging/indulging) pj to make 2 movies instead of one, just to automagically double the ticket sales? ugh.

(xpost 1 up)

<already firing up final cut to make a "phantom edit" of bloated 6 hour hobbit epic fail>

They're going to have a whole bit about driving the Necromancer out of Mirkwood. Probably a big battle scene and everything

they didn't 'have to' excise anything from the books to make lotr compelling, but pj & clunkin scriptwriter team did so anyway because the story needed less wonder and more werewolve action sequences.

These will be worth watching, and regardless of above pic i can't believe they'll look anything less than amazing, but if the same hatchet job is done on the script and the acting is as wooden as in lotr, it'll be another almost-but-not-quite job. Tolkien deserves better than that.

I don't think they're doing two films cos of studio pressure, i think it's entirely down to the hubris of Peter Jackson

i would love to anticipate this, as i LOVED the hobbit as a kid. and loved it just as much when i reread it as an adult. never felt as passionate abt the LOTR books, which i know is heresy, but too much of a great thing is still just ... too much. still, the hobbit, man! fuck.

but good christ i hated the LOTR movies. hated their imagination-free visual style, pitiless length, sopping sentiment, bland characters and funcrushing reverence. half liked the first one in the theater, or tried to, but was utterly defeated by the next two. and fared no better in attempting to give them another chance on video. twice! such awful, awful things.

so how am i gonna anticipate a six-hour hobbat? did no one notice that the book is abt one-fifth the length of the LOTR series? not two fucking thirds...

wasnt one of the complaints about the LOTR movies that they sacrificed the leisurely pace of the books for action movie hijinks? maybe this will be a slow and pastoral journey through middle earth~

if you want to anticipate the Hobbit, imagine a hairy foot disappointing a human face — forever

wasnt one of the complaints about the LOTR movies that they sacrificed the leisurely pace of the books for action movie hijinks? maybe this will be a slow and pastoral journey through middle earth~

more that they dragged some sections, left others out and invented whole new ones in order to 'correct' what jackson saw as pacing difficulties, but yeah.

you might be on to something if we didn't already know that jackson is shooting an entire movie about things that weren't in the hobbit at all.

Some pics

http://imgur.com/a/BXXBA

Wonder why we didn't post the initial trailer...oh wait, ILX was down then.

well here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0k3kHtyoqc

u know what would be cool is if they really take advantage of their short stature to shoot this in a really crazy wide aspect ratio like 4:1

Can't play it cool, I'm pretty excited about this. Martin Freeman looks like he'll be perfect.

Some of the dwarves don't look all that dwarfish though, more like samurai or something.

^yeah, it gets even a little more concerning than that...

Fili & Kili
http://www.flicksandbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/kili-fili-hobbit.jpg

Looks like PJ's intent on bringing individual character and backstory to each of the 238 or so identical dwarves in the book. No wonder we're in for six hours of movies. Wasn't it kind of a joke that there were loads of them and they were pretty much interchangeable in the book?

Still excited though.

this sounds weird

http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/will-new-hobbit-footage-change-3-d-forever.html

some footage about to be shown live streaming right now:

http://www.theonering.net/live/

wait so if it's at 48fps does that mean it looks like when you visit your parents and they're too old to notice that they've got that batshit setting on the tv that makes everything look like a wedding video? surely it doesn't look like that.

(although i'll tell you what's a trip: computer-animated movies with that setting on.)

Jeffrey Wells has seen the revolution at 48 fps:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/04/48_frames_chang.php

I don't really understand why that would make it brighter or anything but the flickering is definitely a problem.

You're watching, it seems, high-def video footage that, in an earlier time, might have been shot simultaneously along with the traditionally captured, more cinematic version that would be shown in theatres...or so you would have told yourself as you watched it in 1998 or 2005 or whenever. Except this is now and the high-def, 48 fps footage we saw this morning is it -- this is how the movie will actually look.

Is this actually saying anything?