If losing its director, its studio going into bankruptcy and unions going to war over whether or not the production would be biased to Australian actors wasn’t enough, now one of the effects houses that would’ve been used for The Hobbit has been seriously damaged in a fire. Now will you believe that the movie is jinxed?
Portsmouth Miniatures Studio, used by Weta Workshops on both the Lord of The Rings trilogy and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, caught fire at 3:10am local time and took crews three hours to put out, according to reports. Although no movie was currently being worked on in the studio, a spokesperson for Hobbit producer Peter Jackson’s production company Wingnut Films confirmed that it was planned to have Hobbit work done there.
Thankfully, no-one was hurt in the fire. The full scale of damage caused is not expected to be known until after the weekend, but items of “commercial sensitivity” were stored within the studio, apparently.
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