14 DAY TRIAL // Remember how fans freaked out the first time director Peter Jackson announced that “The Hobbit” was going to be made into a trilogy for its big screen adaptation? The reason for that was because the book that the movies were going to be inspired on, “The Hobbit,” was way smaller than “Lord of the Rings” which made sense to be turned into a trilogy, since it was so vast.
But it seems that the 300 pages of “The Hobbit” are going to somehow find their way onto the big screen, alongside some surprises Peter Jackson has in store for his fans, and not in that Hollywood style of “make 'em as big as possible to get the most money as possible” either.
Peter Jackson reveals some of his plans for the epic battle scene at the end of "The Hobbit" film
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Peter Jackson reveals that the final “Hobbit” film that has received the title “The Battle of the Five Armies” is going to have a battle sequence that can only be described as epic.
Apart from the fact that it's going to last 45 minutes, which is about half a normal movie, it's going to feature several factions fighting over the treasure of Erebor, you know, the one that Smaug the dragon had been guarding for years.
“We have dwarves and men and elves and orcs, all with different cultures, with different weapons, and different shields and patterns and tactics,” says Jackson about the scene, which reportedly turned into a logistical nightmare when the time came to set it up.
The whole thing was so big that the director needed to draw up so as to not lose track of all the participants
In fact, the battle is so massive that Peter himself needed to draw up a chart he shared with the site, just to be able to keep up with all factions and the major characters.
The battle is going to take place at the foot of the Lonely Mountain where all the various armies are going to clash, but for Jackson the battle had first to take place in his head, “Before we could lose the first arrow, we had to design the landscape itself and figure out, ‘Okay, if we have 10,000 orcs, how much room are they going to take up? Are they going to fill up the valley or look like a speck?’ Then we could start drawing the arrows on the schematics,” said Jackson about the production process.
Also, he warned that the giant eagles are going to make their appearance again, possibly annoying some of the viewers out there who went on to complain about the ending of the first “Hobbit” movie when the hobbit and the dwarfs were simply whisked away to their destination.