5. Thorin and Company
Yes, I know I'm cheating here, and no, I don't care. Not just in fitting in 13 characters into a single entry, but to be fair we've seen these folks already - in a manner of speaking. The trailers and posters have made sure to showcase each dwarf at least briefly. However, these characters are going to be ridiculously important to the trilogy. In fact, apart from Bilbo the company of dwarves may be the single element that the movies
have to get right in order to work. And there are a
lot of them. The Fellowship was only nine characters, and was only formed after the movie had been developing more than half the cast for over an hour. The dwarves show up on Bilbo's doorstep in the
very first chapter of
The Hobbit, so it stands to reason that they'll get thrown together very early in the first movie. The character dynamics are going to of paramount importance, and the film-makers will have a very full plate indeed in doing this quickly so the action can get underway because if there's no reason to care about these characters, none of the trouble they get into along the way will mean anything. This challenge is compounded by the fact that there's not exactly a wealth of character details to draw from in the source material. Many of the dwarves in the book are often relegated to scenery and plot devices, but in a visual medium that simply won't work. Hopefully Jackson won't resort to the short-hand of just making most of them comic relief. But if he can pull off the relationships in a cast this size, he'll give Joss Whedon's character work in
The Avengers a run for its money.