THDOS_Main_sm Since news for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is starting to flood out the door (we posted 15 new stories yesterday), we thought we’d try to recap the big news for readers. We’ll be doing this every day or two from now up until the movie debuts on December 13 to make sure you don’t miss out on anything just because the pace of news is pushing material off our frontpage.

Without further ado, here are the big headlines for yesterday, December 4.

TIME praises The Desolation of Smaug

In what kinda rates as the first review, TIME magazine has dropped The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in at the number 10 spot on its top films of the year. Apparently they were much more lukewarm about An Unexpected Journey last year.

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Production Diary #13

Picking up where the last one left off, Production Diary #13 goes into more pick-up shoots and post production. This time around, we get a great look at Smaug’s lair (look out for a new teasing shot of the great dragon himself!) and Lake-town (including Stephen Fry’s The Master).

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Three B-roll clips of The Desolation of Smaug surface

Follow the Company all the way to Erebor with this revealing B-roll footage. Includes dialogue and many potential movie spoilers!

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Peter Jackson, Richard Armitage and Evengaline Lilly Google-plus Hangout

Peter Jackson, Richard Armitage and Evangeline Lilly participated in a Google+ Hangout answering questions from fans and debuting a new clip from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (which
you can view here). Courtesy of our friends at The Hobbit Movies, we have a rough transcript for you.

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Clips from The Desolation of Smaug featuring Thranduil, Tauriel and Legolas

The first, from EW, features Legolas and Tauriel, the second a throne-room scene with Thranduil and an orc.

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Bilbo and Gandalf “courage” clip from The Desolation of Smaug

A high-definition version of the Bilbo-Gandalf clip that aired last night on The Daily Show popped up on Empire Magazine Australasia’s Facebook page. Of course, we’d seen bits of it before, but this 48 seconds stretches the scene a little further than we’ve previously.

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Bard and Thorin clip from The Desolation of Smaug

Another clip from WB Thailand’s Youtube page featuring Thorin and Bard arguing before the people of Lake-town and the Master that extends one of the sequences that we’d seen just a little bit of in the second and third trailers.

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