“Home is now behind you, the world is ahead”! – Gandalf
For avid fans of the trilogy on The Hobbit, this quote by Gandalf will not seemed unfamiliar. The Hobbit is a prequel trilogy series to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and it features the main character, Bilbo Baggins and the adventures he encountered that is set in a fictional word called Middle-earth. The film is directed by Peter Jackson with the use of stunning New Zealand landscapes which were not a cinematic fantasy, but rather well-captured reality of New Zealand picturesque landscapes where visitors can visit themselves to experience it (New Zealand Tourism, n.d). To simplify things, we will now look at the first trilogy of the series, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
This film is the most successful out of the three, with a whooping box office of 1.017 billion dollars (Box Office Mojo, n.d). The plot revolves around a reluctant Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, in which he conquered the Lonely Mountain with a group of dwarves to reclaim their mountain home and the gold within it, where they meet with obstacles along the way. The rationale of it being a film tourism is because it managed to capture the beauty of New Zealand’s landscape and tie in with a story plot, enticing movie goers to visit New Zealand to experience it themselves. Apart from simply being a film series, it has impacted New Zealand tourism in a great deal, with statistics showing 13% of the visit to New Zealand were influenced by Hobbit films. In addition, since the launched of the first trilogy of the Hobbit series, visitor arrivals have increased to a record annual rate of 2.83m with a growth in independent spending by 10% to $7.2b in end September 2014 (Smyth, 2015).
One of the biggest motivation travellers have in visiting New Zealand is to experience the film sets that were used. It also includes activities such as visiting the Hobbit hole, journeying through dramatic film locations and even a behind-the-scenes workshop tour to learn how the movie masterpieces were created. To link tourism with film franchise, the Hobbiton Movie Set Tours was created. It has garnered about 300,000 visitors annually, making it one of the most visited attractions in New Zealand.
According to Russell Alexander, general manager at the Hobbiton Movie Set tours, he mentioned that “Most visitors are aware of The Hobbit and would feel cheated if they didn’t come and see the set.”
Tourism Media 