In only 19 months time (not really that long for an immortal elf) you’ll be able to see The Hobbit: There and Back Again, the final leg in the new Hobbit trilogy that begins with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey next Friday, December 14, and will continue with The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug one year from now. So while Warner Bros. eeks out every possible dollar you’re willing to spend on this franchise, they are treating you to a small sampling of what you’ll be seeing.
Above is the first image of Orlando Bloom reprising his role as the elf Legolas from the Lord of the Rings trilogy has just arrived as he has a chat with newcomer Luke Evans who plays the human Laketown warrior Bard the Bowman.
As for why Legolas is included in the film even though he isn’t in the books, Peter Jackson tells Entertainment Weekly, “He’s [elven king] Thranduil’s son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in The Hobbit, and because elves are immortal it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the Woodland Realm.” This quote is a good example of how Jackson went about attempting to expand The Hobbit over the course of three films instead of just one considering the book is only one-fifth as large as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
As for Evans’ character, screenwriter Philippa Boyens says, “Bard is an interesting character, but [in the book] he’s kind of a random character who comes in after the fact… We take more time introducing him. We know from what follows that he was a father, so we [explore] that. I don’t think we take liberties, because it’s all there in the storytelling.”
