In case you hadn’t heard, diehard fans of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” received a treat last week with a behind-the-scenes look at the sequel, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” However, you could only participate in the Peter Jackson-led Q&A if you had purchased the ‘Unexpected Journey’ Blu-Ray and entered a code from the DVD package (nifty way to make you spend that extra dough for what will be a double dip release, no?). Well, some of that footage has made it’s way online now and it shows a few small first-look reveals of the cast in action.
In the Q&A, Jackson takes questions from fans, including Stephen Colbert and actor Billy Boyd (Pippin in “The Lord of The Rings” series) and showed off some behind-the-scenes footage. In it, we get to see Orlando Bloom reprising his role as the elf Legolas, Lee Pace as his father, the elf-king Thranduil, Evangeline Lily as the elf archer Tauriel and Luke Evans as the human Bard the Bowman.
While ‘An Unexpected Journey’ was rather linear, Jackson says we can expect overlapping plots in the second film to ramp up the tension in the narrative. “The great thing about the second [‘Hobbit’] movie — as it was with the ‘Two Towers’ actually — is that the stories start splitting up into multiple story lines and we can follow different characters as the story intensifies and the stakes go up,” he said. One of those story lines, as you can tell from the footage, will be the introduction of the elves from Mirkwood (i.e. Pace and his clan). “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” opens later this year on December 13th followed by the final film in the series, “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” opening on December 17, 2014.