The first official photos of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit—prequel to the Lord of The Rings trilogy—hit the web today. Fan’s can catch a sneak peak at Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf the Grey and Bilbo’s humungous feet courtesy of Entertainment Weekly. Hopefully these little morsels will be able to tide fans over until next year.
Tolkein’s The Hobbit will be broken into two parts: An Unexpected Journey slated for December 14, 2012 and There and Back Again set for December 13, 2013. The story of course tells the tale of a young hobbit who is reluctantly enlisted by Gandalf and a group of 12 dwarves to steal back treasure from the infamous dragon Smaug.
The shots give us a first look at Martin Freeman as Bilbo. Freeman is probably best known for his dry deadpan as Tim in the British version of The Office. Peter Jackson told EW about his version of Bilbo, “He fits the ears, and he’s got some very nice feet. I think he’s got the biggest hobbit feet we’ve had so far.”
Thorin Oakshield will be played by Spooks star Richard Armitage, but LOTR fans can expect many of the familiar faces including Cate Blanchett, Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom. Ian McKellen will also be reprising his role as Gandalf in the iconic gray. Peter Jackson believes the older actor is in “fantastic” form and says, “’In a way, his role in The Hobbit has more technical difficulties than Lord of the Rings did, because he has scenes with 14 smaller characters — obviously the dwarves and the hobbit are shorter… “
Even with all the delays, Jackson says that the crew can look forward to a marathon 3 months of shooting and a total of 254 days for the two movies, just short of the LOTR trilogy by 12 days.
