Are we about to see the end of Peter Jackson’s involvement in Middle-earth? Maybe not.
Now everyone has a chance to check out the teaser trailer of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies that Warner Brothers revealed at Comic-Con this year. The last chapter of The Hobbit trilogy looks to be more of the same — but when you’re talking epic fantasy to the scale of Peter Jackson, that’s not entirely a bad thing. Though the film hasn’t yet finished shooting according to Jackson, it’s due out this December, closing out a series of films the director has been working on for nearly 20 years (having started development of the project in 1995).
Is this the last time we’ll see Jackson visiting the Tolkien universe? Jackson admits that there’s footage from the original trilogy that’s yet unseen, leaving the door open for even more extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. The series already has already had two extended editions released that give it a total running time of 726 minutes. And there’s still Tolkien’s The Silmarilion — parts, but not all, of which made it into The Hobbit — to consider adapting, but Jackson makes no promises.
However, the highlight of The Hobbit at San Diego Comic-Con wasn’t really the trailer (which you can watch in full, above) but seeing Stephen Colbert come out to lead a Q&A session with the film’s cast. In case you didn’t know, Colbert is a huge Tolkien fan and when he made an appearance — in costume as a Laketown spy, a cameo role he had in The Hobbit — he might well have been the nerdiest person in Hall H, which was already filled with 6,500 dedicated fans who camped out overnight to get inside.
Check out our photos of the panel below and stay tuned for The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies in theaters on December 17th.
