Teaser Trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
What do you think? Does this mark an improvement over the first movie, or will part 2 of the series be a Two Towers-esque slog? The movie trilogy is clearly a different animal from the novel, and I have to wonder if Desolation will be Peter Jackson’s sandbox for much of the new stuff he’s adding to the story.
New Poster for The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug
I don’t know if I’ll love the movie, but I do have to hand it to Jackson’s design team. They do impressive work. Click the poster for a high-res version.
Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
While writing this installment of Hell is Adaptations, I briefly entertained the perverse notion of splitting this into three, and bloating it with a lot of sidetracks and irrelevant nonsense. I’m sure you can see where this is going, yes? Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings trilogy were serviceable, even though I think the material spiraled out of his control by the third movie, but with The Hobbit he stopped even pretending to respect the source material.
Jackson had originally pitched filming The Hobbit as the first part of a trilogy, with LOTR being adapted as the latter two parts. After a great deal of studio debate, New Line decided to fund a full LOTR trilogy, and The Hobbit got pushed onto the back burner. As it turned out, the LOTR films were a big hit financially, so talk about a Hobbit adaptation made quite the buzz even before the first trilogy had been fully released. Unfortunately for New Line, lawsuits concerning the earnings of the LOTR trilogy were filed both by Peter Jackson and the Tolkien Estate, causing the rights and financial prospects for the Hobbit film adaptation to be entangled by court intrigue for years.
Peter Jackson Teases The Hobbit 2
Not a lot of info in this one, but Stephen Colbert and Billy Boyd both make appearances, and Jackson teases some Mirkwood-related artwork for the second film.
If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out the first in my series examining the history of film adaptations of The Hobbit in “Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit!”