First Hobbit Trailer (with SPOILERS)

[River]

The Hobbit, especially in the beginning, was a little twee for my tastes. I don't mind darkening it up a bit. Nor do I object to playing up the Necromancer side of the story. In the book, it felt like some sort of weird, tacked-on excuse to pull Gandalf out of the story when having a wise and powerful wizard was inconvenient. I was actually quite irritated that this important thing happened entirely off the page...and got even more irritated when I read LOTR and learned that this Necromancer was an even bigger deal than I suspected.

Of course, I understand that Tolkien himself didn't fully realize who the Necromancer was and what Bilbo's ring was when he wrote The Hobbit. So I forgive him. But I still feel cheated and that's why I'm actually happy that the movie version will be more than the children's tale The Hobbit was written as.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Tolkien knew that the Necromancer was Sauron from the beginning (in early drafts he includes a mention of Lúthien's defeat of him, making it quite clear that it was the same character). He just didn't realize how important that fact would become.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yet another cut of the trailer has now been released!

Finding Bilbo: An Unexpected Journey

[axordil]

[yovargas]

Dori!!



That was really, really well done. And PJ would be very lucky if his movie turns out as good as that one did.

[Alatar]

Reminder of the first trailer, from before the change from 2 films to 3. It really makes you wonder what the 2 film hobbit would have been like.

[Dave_LF]

Interesting how little (eventual) film 2 material is actually in there. I wonder if they already knew at that point what was likely to happen.

Boyens did mention they were having to make choices along the lines of "do we cut the eagles or the spiders?"

[Passdagas the Brown]

I actually think the 2 films would have been overstuffed messes. The problem with the three films is that instead of using the extra time to more fully develop the main characters, PJ and company added in a bunch of uninteresting nonsense, such as the Legolas-Tauriel-Bolg plot, the extended Azog-Thorin stuff, the dwarf-dragon confrontation, and a whole bunch of other stuff that wasn't necessary. Had he spent those extra two and a half hours fleshing out the Bilbo-Thorin-Balin relationship, for example, these films could have been masterpieces. But alas, they didn't have much time once they decided on three films. So all PJ could do was very quickly manufacture some action climaxes to round out their structures.

My view is that these films would have been a lot better had the three-film decision been made at the very beginning.

[Primula Baggins]

I don't think anyone would dispute that. I've had the experience of turning one novel into two on a deadline, and it wasn't a matter of just tossing in new events. But I had more than a year to do it, even with the deadlines. It was still hard and I don't think it was entirely successful. The third book was conceived as one book from the very beginning, and for me it works much better.