It's not often that a casting announcement is made more than ten months after a project, even one as massive as The Hobbit, but here we are.  The two-film adaptation of the beloved novel by J.R.R. Tolkein officially started shooting last March after innumerable delays, and now, with production still rolling along in New Zealand, the one and only Billy Connolly has officially joined the massive cast of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again.

The ridiculously successful The Lord of the Rings trilogy featured but one dwarf character – John Rhys Davies's indomitable, tossable Gimli – in its ensemble, but the prequel The Hobbit will feature many a dwarf across both films, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again.  A brand spanking new image from An Unexpected Journey showcases just four of these appetitive, bearded dwarfs.

Last month, that excellent teaser trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey inspired a whole lot of people to start counting down to December 14th without reservation.  Well before the collective nostalgia kicked in, when the two-part The Lord of the Rings prequel was still casting, many fans were skeptical of the decision by Peter Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to incorporate characters not featured in J.R.R. Tolkein's original novel.  Some of those characters are familiar from the popular trilogy, while others, like the one played by erstwhile Lost actress Evangeline Lilly, were created just for the films.

Remember in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings when Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins gifts young Frodo, played by Elijah Wood, with a sword that glows blue when orcs are around?  Well, in the upcoming prequel The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we'll see just how a younger, more adventurous Bilbo acquired that sword, known as Sting.  A new still from the first of the two-part J.R.R. Tolkein adaptation shows Martin Freeman as Bilbo, covered in cobwebs and clutching Sting in what looks like its probably a perilous situation.

Hey, here's a treat: Two official images, one each from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Prometheus, two of the biggest, most anticipated event pictures of 2012.  The images are all kinds of different, with Noomi Rapace wearing her stylish spacesuit in a dark, Giger-y set, and Martin Freeman in full Bilbo Baggins mode on a sunny day in Middle Earth. 

Prometheus and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey have a lot in common, though.  Both are technically prequels to beloved, hugely successful properties, both find crazy-popular directors returning to the properties with which they're most associated, and both see those directors filming features in 3D for the first time in their long careers (Get your Rogue 3D Eyewear right here, folks).  So hey, check out the image from the new movies directed by Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson.

Last week, the first trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey debuted online, causing the internet to collectively look down and say, "That'll do, Peter Jackson.  That'll do."  That trailer was a huge surprise in that it was not as teasery a teaser as everyone expected, given that the first half of the theatrical take on J.R.R. Tolkein's novel is still a year out from its release.  Now, Jackson and friends have released a new behind the scenes production video, the fifth in an ongoing series, that shows even more of Middle Earth. Specifically, it takes viewers through the exteriors of Tolkein's realm, once again portrayed by the landscapes of Jackson's native New Zealand.  Now inextricably connected to The Lord of the Rings, the nation is again home to hobbits, dwarfs, wizards, and all manner of magical goings on. 

Almost exactly a decade ago, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring first brought J.R.R. Tolkein's Middle Earth epic to a theater near you, and in order to commemorate you starting to feel properly old, Warner Bros has released a new official still from next year's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  Actually, the image has more to do with imminent arrival of the film's first trailer in mere hours, but let's seize the opportunity to feel time's gnarled fangs digging into our collective ankle.  The still features Martin Freeman as the titular Hobbit, Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End, the older version of whom was played by Ian Holm when director Peter Jackson last took an extensive tour of Tolkein's fantasy land. 

Despite the fact that it's one of the most anticipated movies – or rather two of the most anticipated movies currently filming on the planet Earth – things went pretty quiet on The Hobbit for a while there.  That's probably owing to the fact that director Peter Jackson and company scheduled the massive production of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again into three distinct blocks, with breaks in between.  Shooting is underway again, and with that, we're hearing more from the production.  Today, for example, there's a new behind-the-scenes video blog straight from New Zealand.  The focus on the technological aspects of the film, specifically the fact that it's being shot in 3D at 48 frames per second.

We didn't really need any further confirmation, but this weekend provides even more proof that America loves its cinematic robots, particularly when they're fighting each other.  After Transformers: Dark of the Moon showcased an almost fetishistic dedication to robot-combat over the summer, Fall has its own robo-pummeling film with Real Steel.  One of only two wide releases over the weekend, the family-oriented, science fiction-tinged boxing drama debuted in first place, almost tripling the estimated gross of the weekend's other new release, George Clooney's considerably more low-key political drama The Ides of March.

The simplicity of boxing makes it a sport particularly suited to effective treatment in all manner of films.  Two opponents, trained to pinnacle of their physical potential, face-to-face an pummeling one another in a ring from which only one victor will emerge.  It's clean, universally comprehensible, and can be mined for maximum drama.  Classic films that have centered, to varying degrees, around onscreen pugilism include Raging Bull, The Champ, Rocky, and, more recently, The Fighter.

If boxing is the sport of kings, then by the transitive property, robot-boxing is the sport of robot-kings.  The new film Real Steel, which hits (seriously, no pun intended) theaters tomorrow, takes place in a near-future inspired by the Richard Matheson short story Steel.  In this stylized setting, traditional boxing has been completely usurped by a version in which the pugilists are no longer flesh-and blood humans, but are instead hulking, nine-foot tall robots designed and built specifically to pummel each other, with a human operator involved via remote. 

Hugh Jackman stars as Charlie Kenton, a former prizefighter who lost his chance at a championship title when the robots took over and now earns a meager living as a hustler of low-level match-ups.  Mortified to find he's suddenly the guardian of a son he didn't know was his, played by Dakota Goyo, Charlie and his boy revive an out-of-date training robot named Atom, and this unlikely trio of underdogs find themselves on the path to robo-boxing glory.  At a press conference in Los Angeles, IAR Managing Editor Jami Philbrick was on hand to hear what Jackman, co-star Anthony Mackie, and boxing legend/ trainer/fight choreographer Sugar Ray Leonard had to say about Real Steel.