Based on financial reports that were recently filed in New Zealand, it came to light that the combined budgets for Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies had reached $745m, which is quite frankly a mind-boggling number. When you consider that those numbers don't include the final few months of post-production on December's The Battle of the Five Armies, it would be safe to assume that the final tally edges closer to $800m. To put it into perspective, that's almost three times as much as the $281m budget for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So how did The Hobbit end up costing so much? The inflation argument goes right out of the window, because even adjusting for inflation the three Lord of the Rings movies still cost less than $400m combined. Jackson's preference for CGI over the practical effects and miniatures used in the Rings trilogy surely drove up the production costs, as did the director's decision to shoot the entire trilogy in 3D using the relatively new 48 frames per second technology. The cost of the Hobbit trilogy works out at almost $250m per movie, which would place all three installments amongst the most expensive movies of all time. Still, despite the latest offerings from Middle-Earth being vastly inferior to the Lord of the Rings movies, An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug have still earned almost $2bn at the box office. With The Battle of the Five Armies almost guaranteed to gross at least a billion dollars, the huge cost of the production will still result in a healthy profit for the studio.
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