Final Hobbit Movie To Close With 45-Minute Battle Scene

The Hobbit movie trilogy looks set to go out with a bang, in the form of a 45-minute battle scene.

Director Peter Jackson has been discussing the climax to The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies - and has insisted that he'll be careful not to let moviegoers end up with "battle fatigue".

"We have a rule that we're not allowed more than two or three shots of anonymous people fighting without cutting back to our principal characters," he told Entertainment Weekly.

"Otherwise the audience just ends up with battle fatigue."

The New Zealander also talked about the logistical challenges posed by staging such a large-scale set piece.

"We had to design the landscape itself and figure out, 'OK, if we have 10,000 orcs, how much room are they going to take up?'

"'Are they going to fill up the valley or look like a speck?' Then we could start drawing the arrows on the schematics."

Jackson was asked about the use of eagles in the movie and revealed that they had been played down as a plot device, compared to the way they were used in writing by JRR Tolkien.

"Tolkien uses eagles in a way that can be kind of awkward because they tend to show up out of the blue and change things pretty quickly.

"So here they're just part of the plan, not the saviours. I mean, I do realise that if the eagles had just been able to bring Frodo to Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings and let him drop the ring in, those movies would have been much shorter."

The film hits UK cinemas on 12 December.