For LEGO developer, Traveller’s Tales, it’s all about the journey with their first venture into “LEGOfying” an Academy Award Best Picture winner. Executive Producer Nick Ricks shared at E3 that the team has been working closely with LEGO and WingNut Studios/New Line to recreate The Lord of the Rings experience as authentically as possible. Some in-game sequences are not completely made of LEGO with cinematic sequences added.

“There’s so much fantastically framed cinematography and brilliant camerawork. We can’t improve on that, so we just need to take it and put it into the game,” Ricks explained.

The usual LEGO voices for characters have also been replaced with theatrical ones such as Orlando Bloom for Legolas, and to streamline the journey, the game world has been created around Tolkien’s original maps where characters can move from Hobbiton to Mordor without jumping in and out of chapters.


Sideshow Collectibles via their Sideshow Experience page announced with a production peek, the Dark Lord Sauron Premium Format. This video shows us some great images of the detail this collectible will have as well as give us a great idea just how LARGE this piece will be. Hopefully, Sauron will be making the trek to Comic-Con 2012 where we can get a real look at how amazing this piece will be. Until we have more information make sure you check out the production peek video at least once or twice.

Weta Workshop has finally answered a long-held wish for fans who collect The Lord of the Rings. For years fans have been asking for a diorama consisting of the nine walkers as they trekked from Rivendell to Mordor to destroy The One Ring. Well, now we get the first set in completing the collectible many of us has wanted with set one of The Fellowship of the Ring set 1. This set is scheduled to ship in quarter four of this year and come with a price tag of $200. Weta states that announcements for the other two sets will happen in 2012.

There has been a stir around message boards and internet hoards for those noticing “Hobbit Trailer 2” showing up on documents and even websites that distributors and movie houses use for official purposes. People are hungry for new footage from “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” and it sure looked like something was coming. But, we can absolutely confirm that “Hobbit Trailer 2,” attached in many instances with “Brave,” this weekend, is not that new footage.

First we have this from the studio:
“TRAILER 2 that was posted about earlier this week is actually not a new trailer in the sense that it will contain new footage, it’s actually a cut-down of the previous trailer.”(More info and another source after the break) Continue reading “Confirmation: ‘Hobbit’ trailer #2 not new material”

Wellywood may be the home of The Hobbit, but Wellington’s cinemas are yet to make the technological shift so Kiwis can see it in all its double-frame glory.

The Dominion Post reports that, while most cinemas plan to install technology necessary to watch the film in 48-frames-per-second (fps), none of those the paper spoke to today had yet upgraded.

According to the paper, Miramar’s Roxy Cinema — refitted with the help of Oscar-winning big names Sir Peter Jackson, Sir Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk — will have the tech in time for The Hobbit’s general release, but others such as Paramount Cinema in Courtenay Pl and Penthouse Cinema in Brooklyn have no plans to make the shift.

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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.” Continue reading “Hobbit trailer to show in US theatres with Brave. But which trailer?”