The Hobbit | featured news

Traffic was sluggish at the multiplex on Friday as a crush of new movies -- including Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher and Judd Apatow's This Is 40 -- competed with one another for the attention of moviegoers already distracted by holiday preparations. Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey beat both new films to stay at No. 1, grossing $10.2 million for an eight-day domestic cume of $123.3 million.

Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" led the box office with a haul of $84.8 million, a record-setting opening better than the three previous "Lord of the Rings" films. The Warner Bros. Middle Earth epic was the biggest December opening ever, surpassing Will Smith's "I Am Legend," which opened with $77.2 million in 2007, according to studio estimates Sunday. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" also passed the December opening of "Avatar," which opened with $77 million. Internationally, "The Hobbit" also added $138.2 million, for an impressive debut well north of $200 million.

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is living up to expectations, grossing $37.5 million to score the biggest Friday ever in the month of December. Overseas, the film's three-day gross (it began rolling out Wednesday) is $57 million, putting its world total at $94.5 million.

The embargo on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey reviews has been lifted, so a number of publications have published theirs online. And surprise! They're not all raves and a number of the critics have issues with the high frame rate (HFR) version of the movie. As of this writing, An Unexpected Journey is 73% at Rotten Tomatoes. Check them out below.

The heirs of late author J.R.R. Tolkien are suing the producers of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" movie trilogies over alleged exploitative merchandizing.

Peter Jackson announces in Facebook post that the third Hobbit movie has been given the greenlight. Originally, only two movies were planned but after completing principal photography a couple weeks ago and seeing a rough cut of the first movie and much of the second, Jackson felt a third movie is necessary to tell the story of The Hobbit in its entirety.

If reaction to "The Hobbit" footage at Comic-Con is any indication, Peter Jackson has another couple of blockbusters on his hands. The crowd attending Jackson's "Hobbit" preview at the fan convention Saturday went wild over a 12-minute reel the filmmaker and his colleagues screened.

Peter Jackson showed a 10-minute work-in-progress clip from The Hobbit at CinemaCon earlier today, and the reactions were decidedly mixed -- not the content of the clip itself, but the format it was presented in. You see, the movies you see in theaters today are shown at 24 frames per second, but that Hobbit clip was shown at 48 frames per second. What is the problem, you asked?

Warner Bros. has confirmed today that the trailer for THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY will play in front of THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN when it hits theaters next week. No word on when it will hit the net, so your first chance to see it might in front of Spielberg's latest.

Over the past couple of weeks, Peter Jackson has been slowly revealing images of the dwarves from THE HOBBIT movies. Considering the timing, that prompted speculation that it was building to something specific, like an appearance at Comic Con. Turns out it was perhaps instead meant to introduce and familiarize people with the characters in costume before the filmmaker released his latest video production blog, which...