45 minutes!
EW spoke with Peter Jackson last week about The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final entry in the Hobbit film trilogy. It mentions that the titular battle at the climax of the film will last 45 minutes. Even assuming the film run time is in the 3 hour range, that’s still nearly a third of the movie just for one battle sequence. That’s massive.
The original description of the battle in question is less than 1500 words. You could probably read it in less time that in takes to get through the trailer at the bottom of this post if you really tried.
I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising considering that The Hobbit is a 320 page novel that has now been expanded into 3 films with a running time closing in on close to 9 hours of screen time.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is released on December 17th in the US.