The Hobbit fans in New York got a little extra treat when Ian McKellen (Gandalf) showed up to speak briefly with all the midnight movie goers who were about to see the film. At point this week I need to write a formal review but basically the movie was superior to the first and highly recommend seeing it. (via io9)
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The little behind-the-scenes clip of Orlando playing with his knives was pretty cool, but this is just a whole ‘nother level of “wow”. Thanks to Ringer Smaug the Stupendous for the heads-up!
Click below (run, do not walk!) and see exactly how Weta created Lake-town using a variety of CGI and VFX techniques.
Posted in Headlines, Hobbit Movie, Locations Sets, Production, The Hobbit, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, WETA Digital, WETA Workshop on April 3, 2014 by DemosthenesTo create the city, our models department built 50 unique buildings, eight unique bridges and six towers, all of which were dressed and scaled differently in order to provide the vast amounts of variance required to populate the 200,000 square metres of ground with up to 1,500 buildings visible in some of the shots.
Over two million planks of wood, more than five million roof tiles and 1,749 walkways were created to bring Lake-town to life.
The Desolation of Smaug's opening weekend US take of $73.65 million fell short of landing the December opening record set by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ($84.6M) but I doubt Jackson and company care considering the film took in $205M worldwide essentially paying for itself in the first three days of release. The assumption is the movie will cross the $1 billion threshold and considering the overall good reviews, I see little reason to doubt it. More details on the breakdown here but basically the movie did as well as it was expected to do.
A new trailer has been posted for the upcoming Lego The Hobbit video game that is done in the style of the movie "Ocean's 11" that introduces most of the game cast. Very tongue in cheek and cute, the game is set to come out sometime in Spring 2014. What is not clear (and the trailer doesn't clear up), is if this game includes all three movies or does it split the The Hobbit trilogy in two halves with a part 2 coming out later for when The Hobbit: There and Back Again is released.
