Peter Jackson’s second installment in The Hobbit movie trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, is set for theaters in mid-December. Here’s the teaser trailer which was recently released:
The first Hobbit film grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide, but it wasn’t up to par with the LOTR movies. It took a bit too long to get moving and the characters weren’t as iconic. Even though the story in Part 2 will be more exciting, the film’s revenues will suffer from the simple fact that this trilogy should have been divided in two — Uncle Peter should have left the extra stuff for the director’s extended cut on DVD.
The first Hobbit movie cost around $250 million. It easily made that back, but many other big-budget films don’t. This is a real concern for the future of huge spectacle movies going forward. Recently Steven Spielberg and George Lucas chimed in about the direction Hollywood is taking, criticizing how so many big-budget films have terrible box office showings. They believe that fact will eventually break the back of the industry without changes. May we one day see a return of big films with more plot than zaz? Perhaps.
