Never Mind Pop Film

PartnersHub and Warner Bros. are giving away a blu-ray of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, all you have to do to win the copy is play the app below to find out if you're Brave like Bilbo. Once you have that, reply the answer  to @WordsByCBiggs with #TheHobbit. Leaving a comment below can't hurt your chances either.



Contest ends April 6th, so have all entries in before then.

Each household is only eligible to win One (1) Blu-ray The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies via blog reviews and giveaways. Only one entrant per mailing address per giveaway. If you have won the same prize on another blog, you will not be eligible to win it again. Winner is subject to eligibility verification.

PartnersHub and Warner Bros. are giving away a digital copy of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, all you have to do to win the copy is play the app below to uncover your Middle-Earth Weapon of choice. Once you have that, reply the answer  to @WordsByCBiggs with #TheHobbit. Leaving a comment below can't hurt your chances either.



Contest ends April 1st, so have all entries in before then.

Each household is only eligible to win One (1) Digital Download Coupon for The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies via blog reviews and giveaways. Only one entrant per mailing address per giveaway. If you have won the same prize on another blog, you will not be eligible to win it again. Winner is subject to eligibility verification.

During Hollywood’s heyday in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s when long-form epics were all the rage, films, especially the higher-grossing ones, would run over three hours long. Lawrence of Arabia, the poster child for movies with intermissions, was aided tremendously by a break because the tonal shift between the two parts is much more jarring kept as one long piece. When I caught a revival of it a year ago, I thought, “Why can’t we still have those today?”

Of course, that film was released over 50 years ago and the time of three-hour-long period pieces is largely behind us. Intermissions no longer seemed necessary with the death of massive epics. Yet here we are in the 21st century and running times continue to crawl north of two and a half hours. This winter alone sees the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, all of which run over 140 minutes. Couple these lengthy features with an additional 10 minutes of advertisem…

You’re bound to be excited by the prospect of some of the great sequels that are due to hit the big screen over the remainder of 2013 if you love film, and probably even if you don’t.

First up is Monsters University the eagerly awaited sequel to Monsters Inc. Billy Crystal and John Goodman return to voices of Mike and Sulley but, despite the sequel hitting the screens 12 years after the original, Hollywood’s two favourite animated monsters appear younger than before. That’s because audiences are getting the chance to see how Mike and Sulley first met at university whilst taking Scaring Degrees – what’s not to like!

X-Men fans we also be delighted to see Hugh Jackman return as Wolverine for the sixth time in The Wolverine; a film which is likely to see the part-man, part-adamantium comic-book hero slaying some bad guys.

The hugely popular trio of ageing spies Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren and John Malcovich return in Red 2, this time with the added bonus of Anthony Hopkins playing the film’s…

Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin's last adventure was a little bloated, so hopefully Jackson's next effort will be tighter. Still the promise of a very large, very gold dragon voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch should be enough to convince moviegoers to buy a ticket.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens December 13.

Want to win a copy of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit? Simply take the Hobbit quiz in the app above and post your score (and email if possible) in the comments below. Scores will be tallied and the contest ends on April 8th.

Please feel free to share this contest via Twitter or Facebook.

UPDATE: The winner is Antony Bosch

Sprawling adventures with set pieces and large casts used to be available only on the big screen. If viewers wanted to watch a story that spans generations they had to go out for the evening and see it on the silver screen. It is no coincidence that, when taking into account inflation, five of the top ten grossing films of all-time are epics (#8 Doctor Zhivago,#6 The Ten Commandments,#5 Titanic,#2 Star Wars, and#1 Gone with the Wind).

Those evenings out have become less frequent as mini-series on television have over-taken the epic onscreen. The elements of one of the most famous epics of all-time, the Lord of the Rings franchise, are recreated on a weekly basis on HBO's Game of Thrones. Going to the theatre is no longer necessary to catch a story on a grand scale. Television has latched onto that market with miniseries.

With television, writers and directors do not have to sacrifice character for cinematic splashes of glory. David Lean had upwards of three hours to tell his stor…

The Hobbit saw a great deal of turmoil cast its way before the first reel was ever shown. MGM went bankrupt, Guillermo Del Toro dropped out of the project and if all of that weren't bad enough, the first buzz about the film was that the high frame rate made it look like an afternoon soap.

Peter Jackson was always going to have a difficult time bringing another of J.R.R. Tolkien's books to life, given the enviable success he had with Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is considered to be the lighter of the two stories and when Jackson announced that he was going to extend the story into a trilogy, sighs could be heard "he's doing it again."

The story is familiar enough: a hobbit is asked by Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) to undertake a journey that could prove dangerous. Bilbo may survive, Gandalf contends, but he will never be the same. Thorin Oakenshield and the remaining members of his clan aim to reclaim their kingdom from the dragon Smaug that ravaged their homel…

Those Hobbit fans watching the film at its midnight premiere on December 14th will take home a very splendid Christmas gift. These four very handsomely crafted posters featuring Gollum, Bilbo Gandalf and Thorin are all in Elvish, so giving them to midnight showing attendees is probably the best idea.

Warner Bros. and IMAX Corp. have just issued a joint press release announcing a partnership through 2013 that will include placing upwards of 20 Warner Bros. films into IMAX theaters, (the biggest being Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pts. 1 & 2, Happy Feet 2, Batman 3, as well as the new Superman film). The biggest news to come out of this whole thing is a tentative release date for The Hobbit of December 2013, two years after its initial date of December 2011. We assume part one will debut in 2013 and part 2 in 2014.

Producer Peter Jackson revealed last week that both scripts for the two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novel are finished and apparently production will begin later in 2011. Good to see that despite MGM's financial woes that the film will commence filming within the next year.