Despite The Hobbit only being a mere 320-page book, Peter Jackson (The Lovely Bones, The Lord of the Rings) has stretched the story into three rather long movies - the second of which, The Desolation of Smaug, came out last Friday.Large handed film critic Mark Kermode has taken a sideways approach to the film's debate: looking at the cold, hard numbers involved. By adding together the total extended running lengths of the three movies (he makes an estimation on the last installment), working out the overall number of frames (double that of a normal film, as Jackson shot it all in 48fps) and comparing those to the source novel's word count, he's calculated...well, it's hard to say what is all proves. But it is quite fascinating.
Check out the wonderfully titled Decimilisation of Smaug below....
So each word in The Hobbit translates as a third of a second on screen. It's an interesting figure, as a common rule-of-thumb in the voiceover world is that, on average, it takes about a second to read three words. Does this mean that reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit aloud would take the same amount of time to watch the entire trilogy?
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is out in cinemas now and stars Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Evangeline Lilly (Tauriel), Lee Pace (Thranduil), Benedict Cumberbatch (Smaug / The Necromancer), Andy Serkis (Gollum), Christopher Lee (Saruman the White), Ian Holm (Old Bilbo), Elijah Wood (Frodo) Sylvester McCoy (Radagast the Brown), Ken Stott (Balin), Graham McTavish (Dwalin), Aidan Turner (Kili)), Dean O'Gorman (Fili), Mark Hadlow (Dori), Jed Brophy (Nori), Adam Brown (Ori), John Callen (Oin), Peter Hambleton (Gloin), William Kircher (Bifur), James Nesbitt (Bofur), Stephen Hunter (Bombur), Luke Evans (Bard the Bowman), Manu Bennett (Azog), Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Billy Connolly (Dain Ironfoot), and Stephen Fry (Master of Lake-Town). Read our ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.