'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' Will Run About 2 Hours 40 Mins. Plus New TV Spot & Denny's Hobbit Menu Items

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by Kevin Jagernauth
October 24, 2012 9:01 AM
2 Comments

As one of our team wrote yesterday about "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey": "I for one will be happy to pull up some popcorn and sit down for 2 ½ (and hopefully not more) hours with moderately tempered expectations and enjoy what I can." It looks like he might want to put his ass into training, as Peter Jackson has revealed the runtime for the first movie in the trilogy and, not surprisingly, it's very, very long.

“It’s looking like it’s going to be about ten minutes shorter than 'Fellowship' was," director Peter Jackson told Empire, noting that effects and sequences were still being finalized. "So it’s going to be officially our shortest Middle-earth yet. I mean, 'Fellowship' was just under three hours and this is about 2 hours 40 minutes at the moment.”

So, let's do some quick math, shall we? Playlister Jess calculates: if we extrapolate that the subsequent two films will also be this length (and previous experience suggests they might even be longer) that gives the trilogy a total of 480 min. And the book is 300 pages. Which means every minute of the trilogy covers .62 of a page, or every page of the book takes 1.6 minutes of film. Which is a lot less less time than, on average, it takes to read a page. Will this be the first book adaptation that takes longer to watch than to read?

And of course, it's already been confirmed that an extended edition is already planned for home video release (and probably for all three movies as well), so those figures above will get even more intense. Is Peter Jackson needlessly milking every morsel out of J.R.R. Tolkien's works (that he has the rights to) or does he truly have a vision for a new epic? We'll soon see. Until then here's a new TV spot, Empire magazine's latest covers related to the movie, and an ad for a Denny's tie in. The restaurant chain is offering promotional menu items including Radagast's Red Velvet Pancake Puppies, Bilbo's Berry Smoothie, Gandalf's Gobble Melt, "The Ring" Burger, Frodo's Pot Roast, and of course a Hobbit Slam. We have no words... [Collider/io9]

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More: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson

2 Comments

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Animafan | October 30, 2012 9:39 PMReply

Remember that Jackson has stated he'll be incorporating events indirectly associated with The Hobbit, such as things that happen in The Silmarillion and when Gandalf disappears in the novel.
Duncan | October 24, 2012 10:51 AMReply

In the pantheon of detailed book adaptations, the "Brideshead Revisited" miniseries probably was one of the first to require more time than the book (10 one-hour episodes vs. approx. 350 pages of reading). Though given that this movie was mostly put together when they decided to split the story into three, I have a feeling that, even including newly shot material, and moving up the ending of "Unexpected Journey", the last two might not reach the 160 minute point. But who can truly know anything, in this life? *evaporates*