Embark on an epic adventure as Peter Jackson, Academy Award-winning director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy unveils The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of a series of three films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Set 60 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey follows the titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), as he is recruited by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and thirteen Dwarves, led by the legendary Dwarf warrior Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). With little more than a map they can’t completely read and Thorin’s consuming drive to reclaim his homeland and legacy, Bilbo is swept up in an epic journey through the treacherous and wondrous Wild on a quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf city of Erebor, which was long ago raided and conquered by the dragon Smaug.

Since setting off on his odyssey to make The Lord of the Rings films, The Hobbit has never been far from Jackson’s mind. When the skies cleared for Jackson and his collaborators to begin the adaptation process, they initially decided to divide the story up into two films. Only in the thick of production, when an early cut of the first film had been assembled, did the true scope of the project reveal itself, and “two became three.”

Jackson says he drew on both Tolkien’s intricate and layered 1937 novel and an additional treasure trove of material the revered English writer, professor and philologist developed in the decades after The Hobbit was first published. “At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien included 125 pages of appendices which provide more backstory to the history of Middle-earth. This included describing some of the politics and events that occur during the years pertaining to The Hobbit,” he explains.
“This new material was more serious, darker in tone, and more in line with The Lord of the Rings.”

So, Jackson and his collaborators on the screenplay—Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his fellow Oscar-winning co-writers on The Lord of the Rings films, along with Guillermo del Toro—set about piecing the material together. “With these films, we wanted to take the charm and humor of The Hobbit and blend it with some of the back story and tone of the appendices,” Jackson notes. “I didn’t want these to feel like children’s films any more than The Lord of the Rings. We wanted to make the very best films we could, films we’d like to see.”

A production of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be released in the Philippines by Warner Bros. Pictures on December 13.

The second film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, will be released on December 13, 2013, to be followed by The Hobbit: There and Back Again on July 18, 2014.