The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’s Runtime Revealed

In an interview with Empire that hits the stands this week, The Hobbit director Peter Jackson revealed that the runtime for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, due in theaters soon, is going to be the shortest of any of his Tolkien-based films.”It’s looking like it’s going to be about ten minutes shorter than [Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring] was,” Jackson told the magazine. “So it’s going to be officially our shortest Middle-earth yet. I mean, Fellowship was just under three hours and this is about 2 hours 40 minutes at the moment.”Of course, we’ll see how that impacts the recently-confirmed Extended Cut of the movie that will be available on DVD and Blu-ray.One has to wonder what the cut originally looked like before a fairly last-minute decision back in July to split Jackson’s two Hobbit films to three, a move that bought Warner Brothers another year of Tolkien-based blockbusters and seems to have given them a holiday tentpole to fall back on every year between now and 2015 when they reportedly plan to roll out Justice League.