Making The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was an expensive undertaking, what paying actors, building sets, and transporting the crew there and back again. According to Wikipedia, the first film in the future trilogy had a budget of $150 million. That’s a lot of cash. And someone has kept track of where it went.
Obviously more than a few gold coins directly benefited New Zealand, which stands in for the location of Middle Earth. Peta Conn, consul-general for New Zealand in New York, gathered some of the facts, which she shared at a New York City screening of The Hobbit.
Facts such as:
– Although The Hobbit has many outdoor locations, ninety-nine sets were built for the film.
– $9,180,000 was spent on set construction materials.
– Bilbo and the dwarves walked to Moria; the film cast and crew, however, flew. In all, they took 6750 domestic flights.
– The crew had to sleep somewhere, and since mid-2009, when the movie began pre-production, they used 93,000 hotel bed nights.
– New Zealand actors worked for 16,000 days during the production. (That was 266 days of filming.)
– $1.5 million of the budget went to food.
– And most importantly, $380,000 was spent on coffee.
The general manager of Western long haul markets for Tourism New Zealand, Gregg Anderson also had facts about the production of The Hobbit.
– Between 600-700 wigs were made for the movie.
– Four tons of silicon were used to make the facial prosthetics that just about every on-screen actor wore.
– Those thirteen dwarves? They actually carried a total of 547 weapons. And these weapons were taken around New Zealand wherever the dwarves went.
Of all of these facts, I believe the ones about the food and coffee are the most important. Gathering a large group of extras together without giving them food and caffeine? That would be perfect…if only director Peter Jackson was remaking Dawn of the Dead.