First Image from The Hobbit: There and Back Again

Entertainment Weekly has posted the first image from The Hobbit: There and Back Again which is the final movie in the trilogy and not coming out until July 18, 2014. The image shows The Bard of Laketown having a conversation with Legolas (Orlando Bloom), likely before the climatic Battle of Five Armies.

“He’s [elven king] Thranduil’s son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in The Hobbit, and because elves are immortal it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the Woodland Realm,” director Peter Jackson explains. Conferring with Legolas is one of the Hobbit trilogy’s major new faces: the heroic human Laketown warrior Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans). “Bard is an interesting character, but [in the book] he’s kind of a random character who comes in after the fact,” says screenwriter and producer Philippa Boyens. “We take more time introducing him. We know from what follows that he was a father, so we [explore] that. I don’t think we take liberties, because it’s all there in the storytelling.”