Warner Bros.
Good work, Bilbo! You just found enough gold to make 30 more seconds of Hobbit movie magic!
Peter Jackson’s new Hobbit trilogy may not be terribly entertaining or necessary, but it’s certainly extravagant. The Hobbit movies look expensive as all hell, because, well, they are – according to New Zealand financial documents recently acquired by The Hollywood Reporter, the price tag for the trilogy currently sits at 745 million dollars. It isn’t clear whether than number includes marketing – if it doesn’t, costs could edge dangerously close to the billion mark when The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies releases this December.
For comparison’s sake, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy cost around 280 million dollars to make, and the original plan for The Hobbit was to make two movies at a cost of around 150 million. Kinda blew that one. But don’t worry, nobody at Warner Bros. Is going to have to answer for this obscene spending – the first two Hobbit movies brought in around a billion a-piece, so the studio is already well in the black for this project.
But hey, let’s lighten the mood with one of the few really good things about The Hobbit trilogy – Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as SMOW-GUH. Here’s Cumberbatch crawling around on the carpet like a goof while doing motion capture for the dragon…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqKhVMk8v1k
That video was a special feature from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Blu-Ray, which hits stores November, 4th. Y’know, just in case you want to further enable Warner Bros. spending addiction.
Via The Hollywood Reporter and GeekTyrant
