New Photos from The Hobbit and Prometheus
Posted 01.15.12 by Ryan
Last week, Warner Bros. released a photo of Martin Freeman walking through a forest as Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist from the upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit. The photo was the first official promotional item to be revealed since the first trailer for The Hobbit debuted in December.
This week, The LA Times has released another new photo of Freeman as Bilbo, but, this time, instead of walking wide-eyed through Mirkwood like the previous photo, the latest photo shows Bilbo looking like he's just been through some kind of fight. Judging from the webbing that clings to Bilbo's clothes and the brandishing of his sword Sting, it's possible that Bilbo has just fought off some great spiders in order to save his dwarf companions.
"The story is very much a children’s story so deciding how to tell this was one of the first things we had to do," co-writer Philippa Boyens, who also helped adapt the Lord of the Rings trilogy, told The Times. "Who is the audience? It is very distinctly different, tonally, to Lord of the Rings until the very end and then you begin to see the world of Middle-earth opening up… but, having said that, we felt that it is the same audience [who will come to see the films] and then you start to worry because it is easy to repeat yourself. It is quite a similar journey, you’re going from the Shire to a large, dangerous mountain."
The Hobbit will arrive in two parts — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in December, followed by The Hobbit: There and Back Again in 2013. Based on J.R.R. Tolkien's novel of the same name, The Hobbit was adapted by Boyens, Fran Walsh, Guillermo del Toro, and director Peter Jackson. An Unexpected Journey opens December 14th.
The Hobbit isn't the only prequel to get a new image. The LA Times also revealed a new image from director Ridley Scott's new sci-fi movie, Prometheus, the non-prequel prequel to his 1979 classic Alien. Scott said last month that Prometheus, which did start out as a prequel to Alien at first, will "absolutely not" contain any of the acid-bleeding xenomorphs from the Alien franchise, but would still deal with the "Space Jockey," a creature found only as a victim of the xenomorphs by the Nostromo crew in Alien. Leaked pre-production photos of "space Jockey" masks further confirmed the presence of the creatures and the latest photo only continues to add evidence.
"The movie is definitely epic in its scope," Prometheus screenwriter Damon Lindelof told The Times. "One of the filmmakers that we ended up talking about to a fair degree of redundancy was David Lean, who directed Lawrence of Arabia. We wanted to make the movie feel big by having the characters be small in big spaces. That connected to the larger themes we were talking about — that we’re all just these little gnats crawling around on our little planet.
Prometheus was written by John Spaihts (The Darkest Hour), until Lindelof came on board, at which point, Scott announced that the story had "evolved" beyond the Alien franchise and into "a new, grand mythology and universe where this original story takes place." The cast includes Michael Fassbender (X-Men: First Class), Charlize Theron (Young Adult), Idris Elba (Thor), Guy Pearce (Memento), Logan Marshall-Green (Devil), Patrick Wilson (Watchmen), and Rafe Spall (Anonymous). Prometheus opens June 8th.