by Darren Franich, Source: ew.com
Tomorrow, Warner Bros. will host their presentation at CinemaCon, and EW has confirmed that the studio will screen some material from Peter Jackson’s hotly-anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey — the first part of the Hobbit duology, which is totally a word now thanks to Hollywood. Warner is keeping mum about exactly which scenes from The Hobbit will screen, although an earlier report by The Hollywood Reporter claimed there would be about ten minutes of footage. Which gives us the opportunity to speculate. Besides the ominous teaser, this will be pretty much the first new video from Peter Jackson’s version of Middle-Earth in almost a decade. What would you want to see from The Hobbit?
Since the footage will apparently only come from the first film, it seems unlikely that attendees will get to see any of the epic battle sequence which ends the book. It’s still unclear precisely how the movies will split the narrative, but it seems likely that the first movie will be mainly about the trip to Lonely Mountain, while the second movie will be about the various events surrounding Lonely Mountain — similar to the journey/battle structure of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, except with less horcruxes. There’s a lot of great visuals in the first half of The Hobbit: The forest of Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, the ginormous eagles.
Personally, I know exactly which scene I’m most intrigued to see. I still have nightmares from the “Gollum’s Lair” sequence in the ’70s cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit, and I’d love to see how Jackson and his team films the game of riddles between Bilbo and Gollum. Weirdly, that relatively quiet sequence is probably the single most memorable scene in the book. (J.R.R. Tolkien probably realized that — Lord of the Rings is basically one long sequel to that scene.)
Fellow Hobbit fans, which footage would you want to see, if you were at CinemaCon?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByyQg6Tjpx8&w=420&h=315]
