While INSANE DETAILS about Denny's Hobbit Happy Meals for grownups continue to shake the internet to its very foundations—and don't forget, one of those could be yours, and you could eat it with me and Steve right there, watching you—Peter Jackson's been telling Empire how long the first of his three Hobbit movies is going to be, and if you guessed that Jackson still has yet to find anyone who'll tell him "No," you are correct!
“It’s looking like it’s going to be about 10 minutes shorter than Fellowship was," explains Jackson. "So it’s going to be officially our shortest Middle-earth yet. I mean, Fellowship was just under three hours and this is about 2 hours 40 minutes at the moment.”
The "at the moment" refers to the fact that the credits hadn't yet been added and not all effects shots finalised when we spoke to Jackson, but it's going to be close. (Via.)
Keep in mind that The Fellowship of the Ring was a condensed adaptation of an entire novel, while The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be an adaptation of the first part of a far, far shorter novel, along with some extra stuff that was originally put in to pad the movie out to make two movies, and now is padding the movie out to three movies. By the time The Hobbit actually comes out, I'm pretty sure Jackson's going to announce it'll be better as a weekly TV show that will run from now until 2042. Each hour-long episode will consist of three minutes based on The Hobbit and 57 minutes loosely inspired by some stuff that Jackson vaguely remembers possibly reading in one of the Appendices.