The Hobbit SDCC Giant Banner & Peter Jackson Talks Shooting Extra Footage

Director Peter Jackson likes to do things on an epic scale. Which is why this gigantic banner for “The Hobbit”, unveiled at the ongoing SDCC 2012, would please him. It shows off quite a few details about the characters and situations from the film, including our first look at Beorn the Bear — a character fans of the book will be familiar with. Check it out on in its full glory!

(Click on the image to view it in super-sized detail)

Jackson was also in attendance to present footage. This time, the presentation was in regular 24frames-per-second, and not the controversial 48fps that led to criticism of looking “fake”. When asked by Comingsoon if he had any plans to return to the world of “The Lord Of The Rings” he mentioned that they had toyed with the idea of using material from the books to create new footage, perhaps even a whole new feature. Nothing has been confirmed yet however. Jackson said:

“It’s very premature. I mean we have an incredible source material with the appendices because ‘The Hobbit’ is obviously a novel but we also have the rights to use this 125 pages of additional notes where Tolkien expanded the world of ‘The Hobbit’ published at the end of ‘Return of the King’ and we’ve used some of it so far and just in the last few weeks as we’ve been wrapping up the shooting and thinking about the shape of the story, Fran and I have been talking to the studio about other things we haven’t been able to shoot and seeing if we persuade them to do a few more weeks of shooting, probably more than a few weeks actually, next year. And what form that would actually end up taking, well the discussions are pretty early. So there isn’t really anything to report but there’s other parts of the story that we’d like to tell that we haven’t been able to tell yet.

“We’ve used more source material than ‘The Hobbit.’ For instance in ‘The Hobbit’ when Gandalf mysteriously disappears for chapters, it was never really explained where he’s gone. Much later Tolkien filled in those details. In these appendices he did talk about what happened. And it was all together a lot darker and more serious than what is written in ‘The Hobbit’. And also to be honest I want to make a series of movies that run together so if any crazy lunatic wants to watch them all in a row there will be a consistency to it, a consistency of tone.

“So I don’t want to make a children’s story to go into ‘The Lord of the Rings’ so we are providing a balance. I mean a lot of the comedy and the charm comes from the characters. You’re dealing with Bilbo Baggins who is a bit more reluctant to go on an adventure than Frodo was and with Dwarves who have a personality and camaraderie all of their own, so there’s a lot of humor but there are still some serious themes involved.”

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” stars Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Evangeline Lilly, Andy Serkis, Richard Armitage, John Bell, Jed Brophy, Adam Brown, John Callen, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, Ryan Gage, Mark Hadlow, Peter Hambleton, Barry Humphries, Stephen Hunter, William Kircher, Sylvester McCoy, Bret McKenzie, Graham McTavish, Mike Mizrahi, James Nesbitt, Dean O’Gorman, Lee Pace, Mikael Persbrandt, Conan Stevens, Ken Stott, Jeffrey Thomas, Aidan Turner, and Billy Connolly. It premieres 14th December.