Nov 30, 2012 - Crikey Weekender
Blockbuster movie premieres don’t get any bigger than the opening of Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit movie. But the road to get here has been anything but smooth.
On a bright and sunny day in Wellington, a giant billboard moves across the blue sky, flying as low as 300 metres above the ground.
The Boeing 777-300 is emblazoned with images promoting The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of three mega-budget Hobbit movie adaptations from blockbuster director Peter Jackson. The 73-metre canvas took six days and 400 hours to apply. The exhibitor of this gargantuan flying advertisement, Air New Zealand, claims it is the largest graphic ever applied to an aircraft.
On the ground below, tens of thousands of fans — some camped out overnight — gather around Embassy Theatre and its long red carpet. A 9.4-metre tall sculpture of Gandalf, which took contractors more than 12 hours to erect, looms like a frozen Greek god above the entrance.
Some have in their pockets commemorative Hobbit-themed coins, which they can use to purchase jewellery and merchandise at the Hobbit Artisan Market. In days leading up to the event some will have sent letters and postcards to friends and family using Hobbit-themed stamps.
Those who have recently landed by plane would have seen a four-minute airline safety video starring elves, dwarves, hobbits and a famous wizard. They would have walked past a 12-metre sculpture of Gollum, which cost some $250,000, and picked up their luggage from “Baggins Services”.
Nearby the Embassy, overlooking Wellington’s harbour, figures of 13 giant dwarves — reportedly the world’s tallest — and one Hobbit cast shadows on the water below. They stand on the fifth story of a 12-floor office building, designed to withstand winds of up to 178 kilometres an hour.
The city, New Zealand’s capital, has been temporarily renamed “The Middle of Middle Earth”.
This is a movie premiere that has, you might say, stopped the nation. Predictably, the international press relished the spectacle from afar. The cost has been colossal, the profits likely to be greater. And the road to get here has been anything but smooth.
The ribbon cutting of The Hobbit #1 signifies a tale of many things: laws and business models circumvented, a federal government bending to the whims of a film crew, a production that spiralled out of control and a director who raised his already titanic profile to levels of power and responsibility befitting a king — and on the way attempted nothing less than changing the way movies are created.
Full story at Crikey Weekender
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