I don't usually buy audio recordings but I'll have to look into that edition. That would be awesome.

I sort of agree. Outside of Legolas and after the LOTR ended, Bloom played a lot of pussy roles. What happened to the badass elf from LOTR? He ain't here.


Then again, he's in The Hobbit to further tie-in the existing LOTR movie-verse. I don't have a problem with that.

Sign up for the "free month of Audible", you get a token (free book) with it, and when you cancel you still keep it.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fan...6516526&sr=1-2

I'm not excited for this one but i am interested in it. I've actually never been excited for this new series of films. The hobbit was very overblown but I enjoyed it. I do hope this one is better. Not really interested in the third film until I are a trailer for it.

The Hobbit still made over $1billion worldwide so that's still not too shabby. I agree about making 3 movies hurt it's BO. LOTR was so epic and an event that anymore of a good thing would be anti-climactic. And I wonder how many saw it in HFR and didn't like how it looked so repeat attendance was down.

I think some people saw splitting it into three movies was a money grab (rightfully so, IMO) and the 48 fps turned off a lot of people. It didn't help that the first movie really felt superfluous. I still haven't bothered to buy it on BD, not because I'm waiting for the trilogy box set, but because I can't fathom watching it again.

Strangely enough, most my favorite scenes in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey were the ones that weren't from the book. It was mostly the stuff with Radagast, the White Council, or the historical flashbacks which pulled the story more in line with the Lord of the Rings that interested me. The shit with Bilbo and the Dwarves, not so much.

Agreed that the pacing was terrible; it felt like an hour could have been trimmed out of the movie without losing any bit of the story. It felt like every shot and beat ran a few seconds longer than it needed to.

I'm a huge LOTR fan. I can watch it now and it has the same impact on me as it did when it first came out. But man, it's hard for me to get through The Hobbit. I wish they didn't include Elijah Woods or Iam Holm, they look so different from lotr, it approaches the uncanny valley. Another thing, every set piece is too long and drawn out, I would list them but it's literally every one in the movie. And why was Azog included? I liked the flashback to the Battle of Azanulbizar, but the movie didn't need an antagonist.

Agreed. Also liked the brief clip of the young Bilbo. Needed more of that stuff.

I was suspect about it as well, but the girlfriend wanted to watch it, so plopped in the extended BD, and I honestly liked a lot better the 2nd time. Even though it was the extended version, it seemed to go by a lot quicker than when I saw it in the theater last year. Maybe because I knew what I was in for, and I could just kick back on my own couch and enjoy it for what it is.

I have watched it more than once (mainly for work), and I found it got more ponderous each time.

What did the extended add? Did it make it a better film?

Naked dwarfs.

Soooooo it was better for it?

You sick bastard.

Early reviews make this sound like more of the same. Bloated, with endless unnecessary CGI. Ugh.

Yes, the EE version of The Hobbit is way better than the theatrical.

The EE of The Hobbit doesn't add much except a few musical numbers. Only ten minutes were added to this while FOTR had about an hour, and it did some character development.

Unexpected Journey actually grew on me with subsequent viewings, once I got past all of the stuff that was unnecessarily added.

I assume you can get it on iTunes and on CD.

The third film will have the Battle of Five Armies, it'll probably be worth it for that alone.

I wonder why the 48 FPS was a big deal? You could see a regular version if you were inclined. I'd assume only certain theaters could project it anyway. How does a "framerate" work on digital?

It was flawed as hell, but I enjoyed it anyway. I'm sort of hoping some of the stuff that weighed it down will pay off in future installment, but I kind of doubt it.

Peter Jackson, master of excess. I'm guessing that the studio figured "hey, it worked last time." Although Michael Bay's Transformers movies were every bit as long and excessive, and didn't have a good source material or much of anything worthwhile to fall back on, and the public seems to flock to see them in droves. So what do I know?

It basically felt like an LOTR guest list. That might've been fun for the EE, but the movie should've just hit the ground running, the whole thing about the original of Erabor tried to evoke the much better prologue of Fellowship. Like I said, in the extended edition, it might've been interesting, here it slows down a story that hasn't even started yet.

They weren't quite as excessive as the ones in Jackson's King Kong. Not much consolation, I know and there are some cool bits, but the Dwarves surfing down layers of mountains and hanging off of trees thousands of feet above the ground can't help but call to mind the most excessive CG movies-the Star Wars prequels, Van Helsing, etc. And that's not good.

I think that it was for a number of reasons, first of all being that since they obviously had no intention of showing Smaug in the first movie, they wanted some sort of antagonist. Second, they probably wanted to include him with the wide story about the Dwarf nation in the Battle of Five Armies at the end. Third, they probably wanted him for Thorin's backstory. My question is, why the hell create him with CG so that he looks like an albino reject from Avatar rather than use makeup and make him appropriately scary like Lurtz from Fellowship?

Jackson thought the audience for this was whom?

Really? Early buzz on RT says it's an improvement over the first.

There isn't any more to adapt anyway. Christopher Tolkien damn sure isn't selling anything else.

Why does foreign box office come up less often? I mean, this movie is a US-New Zealand co-production anyway, isn't it? Does studios not make as much from foreign receipts because they have to give cutbacks to the theater chains, distributors, etc.? I know that in the case of China (and Hong Kong), it's sort of pointless because the government takes a chunk of it, but wouldn't that be the exception rather than the rule?

I think its a combination thereof, sadly, and the massive budget is probably why WB wanted to do the 3-D and 48 FPS in the first place. Though I assume that shooting all three as one big thing helps rather than hurts the budget, or is at least designed to help anyway.

I hope the bloat in this one is better than the bloat the last time around!

The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture.

Sounds like most of you are waiting for this:

Given that some of the new material is intertwined with some of the old, I don't know if that's possible, though I'm sure some fan-editor will have a go at it.

Well, if they edit it and use only the scenes that we're featured in the book, I'm guessing it'll mostly be pretty coherent. After all, the book was.

Listen to the commentary on the EE version - all of your questions will be answered.

It's similar to how it works on TVs; the model projector has to support it. Most digital projectors have a higher framerate that 24fps anyways, it's just that they're typically projecting the same frame repeatedly a few times. There's a bit of an issue with bandwidth and processing power for having both higher resolutions and higher framerates, but newer projectors will realize it. But yes, only a few digital theaters did show the last film in HDR, and only a few will this time.

I believe, like the LOTR prologue, the team played around with putting those scenes later in the film as flashbacks, but it had the most impact at the beginning. It set the stakes. They stated that it made Thorin's entrance into Bilbo's home have more impact, as otherwise that would've been the first time the audience had seen him, and so wouldn't know why it was such a big deal that this particular dwarf had shown up.

The making-of appendices in the extended edition DVD/Blu-ray sets explain why: They originally had that character as a physical character played by an actor in make-up and suit on the set, but a completely different design. They realized soon after starting shooting that the design wasn't working, but they didn't have time to go back for a redesign, so kept shooting the guy in suit on the set, then replaced him with a CGI redesign in post.

Something similar happened to the globins. They originally had full suits with remote-controlled animatronic heads, but after a few days, realized the suits were too hot and the heads too cumbersome for the actors playing the goblins to give the right performance. So they decided to shoot the goblins with the suits on but no heads on, which allowed the actors to stay cool enough and move around appropriately, and put CGI heads on them in post, as well as add in additional goblins to shots.

Fans of Tolkien? He originally wrote the scene in the book, although it took place somewhere else:
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2013/11...money-day.html

I don't think it's considered a co-production in terms of financing, the US companies New Line and MGM financed the whole thing. And yes, studios typically get a smaller cut of foreign box-office, although foreign is becoming more and more important, especially with big-budget effects films. With The Hobbit, foreign may be more important, as for LOTR, New Line had pre-sold foreign distribution rights in order to finance the films, so didn't get that big of a cut, if any. For The Hobbit, New Line and MGM are likely getting bigger cuts of the foreign box office.

Actually, while I can see the studios wanting it shot in 3D, I'm pretty sure the 48 FPS HFR was Peter Jackson's idea. The studios have been reluctant to grab onto it, as it does at least incrementally increase costs (twice as much footage to store, and twice as many CGI frames to render), and there was no known demand for it prior to The Hobbit. The ones pushing for HFR appear to the filmmakers at the moment, basically just Jackson and James Cameron.