I’m being honest with that title… there were some spoilers revealed for the three upcoming films adapting The Hobbit and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings though this panel, TheOneRing.net: The Truth About The Hobbit, was in no way officially associated with the production. However, as you might know TheOneRing.net is the premiere website for J.R.R. Tolkien film-related news, and despite being a fan site the site has friends within the production and carefully studies all the promotional materials to glean information on the upcoming films.
The guests, who all write for the site, revealed a few bits of information that they were able to find mostly from, believe it or not, toy marketing materials. If you recall, some pretty significant revelations of plot and character designs from The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man were taken from toy advertisements, so TheOneRing.net staff isn’t off-base using this material as sources of information. So, without further ado, here are a few Hobbit details… SPOILERS are below, so you have been warned.
The first part of the panel focused on the dwarves and how the filmmakers have given each dwarf “family” (i.e., the groups of dwarves who are related, like Dwalin and Balin and Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur) a different U.K.-based accent. This is intended to help accomplish the difficult task of differentiating the thirteen dwarves for audiences.
Focus then shifted to Legolas, who will appear in the film even though he was not in The Hobbit novel (his father, Thranduil, is a major character, hence Lengolas’ retroactive inclusion) and the female warrior elf Tauriel, who is a character created just for the film. The panel revealed that based on toy release schedules Legolas and Tauriel (whom the panel hinted at being romantically linked) would not appear until the second film, and will likely actually save Thorin and Company from the spiders in Mirkwood, a significant departure from the novel (this is based on a Lego set advertisement). Of course, it’s all-but-confirmed that Tauriel will meet her end in the third film during the Battle of Five Armies, since her lack of appearance in The Lord of the Rings would need to be explained.
We also got to see several pictures of the goblins/orcs, who will make up the main villains of the film (next to Smaug, of course). One particularly cool looking orc is named Yazneg, and TheOneRing.net staff speculated that he was a Guillermo del Toro design (especially since if you look carefully at his belt you’ll notice he’s wearing the skins of dwarves). Check out Yazneg’s action figure below:
TheOneNight.com staff next gave their best guess on how the films will end, with the first film ending after the chapter “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire” and the second film ending with the death of Smaug. The panel also spoke a lot about the decision to go from two films to three (although the panelists insisted that Peter Jackson always intended on making three films and held out so long from directing in order to bring Warner Bros. around to the idea), focusing on the sheer amount of material the films are using from the Appendices, including laying much of the the history of the wars between the dwarves and the orcs to firmly establish their conflict. That made me feel a lot better about making three films for a book shorter than each of the volumes of The Lord of the Rings.
The last part of the panel focused on possible deaths, and it was the one part I wasn’t in agreement with the panelists on. They speculated that the wizard Radagast would be killed off since he isn’t featured in The Lord of the Rings films, and that instead of Fili and Kili dying in the Battle of Five Armies only one will to “heighten drama.” Neither of these ideas really had any concrete evidence behind it, so I wouldn’t take them with any degree of validity.
Overall, the panel had some really fascinating details about the upcoming trilogy — and for more details, feel free to check out TheOneRing.net!
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