The Hobbit Trilogy's Huge Budget Revealed

The production of Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit’ series has topped £461 million, according to new papers filed by the production.

Now that’s a lot of big, hairy rubber feet…

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Financial documents submitted in New Zealand place the production at nearly one billion New Zealand dollars up to March this year.

The numbers encompass both the physical production of the film and the costly special effects and post-production, which are also dealt with in New Zealand, at Jackson’s company Weta Digital in Wellington.

We assume they don’t include the marketing costs - which are often equal to the production budget. 

This all means that the final cost of the three new movies in Jackson’s Tolkien adaptation series could be among the most pricey in movie history, with the expenses between March and the release of the final movie in December, ‘The Battle of the Five Armies’, yet to be declared.

Speaking to AP, Candice McDonough, a senior vice president at New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Entertainment said: “We don’t comment on production budgets.”

But because Warner Bros had set up a company to solely handle the movies in New Zealand, it means that the figures are available for the public to see.

The government also provided a sum of around £60 million to the production as part of an incentive scheme to attract other films to the country.

But whatever the final cost of the films, they’ve already made the money back for producers New Line Cinema, MGM and Warner Bros, having hauled in $1.9 billion (£1.17 billion) already with the release of the first two films, ‘An Unexpected Journey’ and ‘The Desolation of Smaug’.

Despite this being an eye-watering sum of money, it still puts the productions behind a handful of the single most expensive movies of all time.

'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' currently sits atop that chart, having cost around £185 million.

Disney animated movie ‘Tangled’ isn’t far behind, costing $260 million (£160 million).

Currently, ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ sits in joint eighth place on the list of most expensive movies of all time – with a production budget of $225 million (£139 million) alone, alongside ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian’, ‘The Lone Ranger’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’, and ‘Man of Steel’.

'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' is out in the UK on December 12.

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Image credits: Warner Bros