'The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug' Leads Nominations for Empire Awards; Beats '12 Years A Slave?'
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug is leading with seven nominations at The Jameson Empire Awards 2014.
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This comes as a bit of a surprise as the film hasn't done quite as well when it came to Oscar and Golden Globe noms. The monthly film magazine's annual awards are essentially fan-based. Empire readers get to vote for the winners.
12 Years A Slave closely follows Desolation with 6 nominations.
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The first installment of the trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, won an award for Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Best Actor (Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins) at the Empire awards last year. The film has been nominated in the category of Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Best Actor.
Desolation of Smaug has also been nominated for Best Film.
Here are the other categories the fim is nominated for:
Richard Armitage for Best Supporting Actor
Evangeline Lilly for Best Supporting Actress
Peter Jackson for Best Director
Aidan Turner for Best Male Newcomer
In other related news, it was announced that the DVD and Blu-ray for The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug is scheduled to release on April 8.
The film will be available in a variety of packages which will also feature a limited collector's edition set for $105.43, a Blu-ray 3-D combo pack for $44.95, a Blu-ray combo pack for $35.99 and a 2-disc DVD special edition for $28.98.
Only 25,000 pieces of the collector's edition will be available in the U.S. and will include two Gates of Erebor replica bookends and a theatrical version of the film in 3-D high-definition, high-definition and standard definition.
After the success of The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, fans eagerly await the last in the trilogy, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, which will release later this year.
Giving away a few spoilers, director Peter Jackson had previously told Yahoo! that there could be a massive clash -- as in J.R.R. Tolkien's original novel -- between the elves, men, dwarves, and goblins, when they arrive at the Lonely Mountain.
In a recent interview with Hypable, Jackson also spoke about his decision to break the story into three parts, making it a trilogy, suggesting he wanted to give it a similar structure as he gave The Lord of the Rings.
"You want the narrative to be told either through the dialogue or the actions, so that's really why we ended up with the depth and exploring the character depth that we had done on The Lord of the Rings," he said.
