The first installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy hits theaters on December 14. As previously discussed on TG Daily, although there’s a big built in audience for the Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movies have made a reported $2.9 billion world-wide, Warners has also invested a reported $500 million in filming and marketing the Hobbit trilogy, making this project a big roll of the dice.
As Deadline confirms, advance tickets for The Hobbit will go on sale November 7, and as a Warner Brothers source told the site, “We’re expecting a big result as we start the journey for all three films.” You’ll also be able to buy tickets for marathon screenings of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, extended cuts no less, which will be back in theaters on December 8 and 9. I know at least one person who caught the Lord of the Rings marathon years back at the Cinerama Dome in L.A., it went over ten hours, and for the next round I hope they’ll be selling rubber donuts in the lobby. Not a bad merchandising idea actually…
While some wondered if there was enough material to make three movies out of the Hobbit, Peter Jackson told the L.A. Times, “There’s a lot of material, a lot of action, a lot of adventure. What we decided at the very beginning that we would take as much of that material as we needed to and we would expand it.”
And as Jackson told Variety, there’s a lot of material Tolkien wrote in the appendices of Return of the King, 125 pages of it, which will be incorporated into The Hobbit and add extra depth as well as texture to the films.
“We had the right to use that material as well… So this is The Hobbit supersized,” he added.
Funny enough, as much as people feel there may not be enough for three Hobbit films, Jackson recently announced that the first installment is two hours and forty minutes long, which makes it his shortest Tolkien adaptation to date.
If you still can’t get enough of The Hobbit, we recently confirmed on TG there will be an extended version of An Unexpected Journey hitting store physical and virtual store shelves about a year from now. Imagine when The Hobbit trilogy is completely finished and released and they can set up marathons of the whole series that should run at least a day or two, maybe even longer with the extended home versions.
