Our spies have sent us simultaneously exciting and puzzling information about the forthcoming Hobbit trailer:

“Deluxe Digital has sent our theater the new US trailers for this upcoming week, and I was delightfully surprised after I read through the list. We have received the SECOND Hobbit trailer, although the 48fps or any other format is still unknown to me. It instructed us, along with several other theaters, to attach the trailer to Brave, which premieres this Friday.

Unfortunately, our district manager has opted [for] us to attach three different trailers, none of which are The Hobbit.”

Our anonymous tip-off, who lives and works in the American mid-west, also sent us copies of the instruction sheets. On it, we discovered that the listed length exceeds the 2:24mins of the G-rated clip cited by the Alberta film board by five seconds.

Our spy tells us that: “the original Hobbit trailer that we already had … had a run time of 2:31 on the main server. So it’s confusing as to why we would get another shipment of the first Hobbit trailer, if we ALREADY have it.”

“The only other explanation that I have is the possible 5 second black transition we normally use to space out the trailers, but I don’t think that would be accounted for in the trailer itself.”

What’s going on here? We’re now beginning to wonder whether this “new” trailer for US theatres, only a few seconds shorter than the one we’ve already seen, will actually feature much that’s new at all.