Cryptozoic Entertainment™, the premier developer of original and licensed trading cards and games, in partnership with Warner Bros. Consumer Products today announced an all-new trading card collection based on the The Hobbit Trilogy from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson and a production of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM). The Hobbit-inspired Trading Cards will let fans collect their favorite moments from the three films.

“The Hobbit features a wealth of great characters, locations, and adventures from Middle-earth,” said Miranda Charsky, Cryptozoic's trading card brand manager. “We're very excited to work with Warner Bros. Consumer Products to bring fans of this timeless story something very special and authentic to these epic films.”

The first trading card collection for The Hobbit Trilogy will be The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Trading Cards. This first product is currently slated for an early 2014 release. Trading cards for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: There and Back Again will be released after each film.

For more information on this and other trading cards, please visit www.cryptozoic.com. Stay up-to-date on news, updates, contests and promotions by following Cryptozoic Entertainment on Facebook and Twitter.

YES!!

Here's the link to the announcement on Cryptozoic's site:

http://www.cryptozoic.com/arti...ing-cards-are-coming

Thank you Cryptozoic.

(Lord knows Topps wasn't going to do anything with the license.)

Finally!

Great news indeed

eh...not really a fan of the movie, but good to see they aren't just doing a board game for it.

This set must have taken a lot of "Negotiating".

Will there be autographs and relics?

I hope this set will include autograph and sketch cards.

This is fantastic news!!!!

quote:

Originally posted by treksearcher:
This set must have taken a lot of "Negotiating".

Will there be autographs and relics?

quote:

Originally posted by madcollector:
I hope this set will include autograph and sketch cards.

But I agree, I'd like to know more about what will be included.

quote:

Originally posted by treksearcher:
This set must have taken a lot of "Negotiating".

Will there be autographs and relics?

I'm quite sure the negotiating must have been intense! WB Consumer Products hasn't seemed to be cooperating much recently with cardmakers, which could just mean that they want a bigger portion of control and profits.

I suspect that they are very leery about spoilers, and they don't want to share images and plot points until after a movie is released. I'm not surprised that there wasn't an *early* Hobbit set because they were scrambling to get the first movie out. Now New Line and WB have had a bit of time to collect relics, and I assume they are involved with the process of collecting auto signers.

As for sketches, I expect them to be more picky about depictions of characters and scenes and we might not see anybody making a thousand couple-of-bucks sketches. Topps probably got lucky with their original LOTR licensing by signing a contract with New Line before we knew the movie marketing options would be huge and WB entered the licensing. We might see sketch-centric series like Masterpieces and Evolution - the LOTR "movie" sets did quite well with just autos and props. But Artbox never was able to make Harry Potter sketches when dealing directly with WB, and I'm sure they tried. A lot of that depends on what approval rights the studios gave the actors in their contracts: We learned in another thread that HBO didn't permit *any* character depictions in GOT2 sketches.

All that said, I'm pumped up for whatever Cryptozoic is able to achieve. I haven't seen them making any extreme compromises in quality for any of their other sets.

This is great news this maybe just what I needed to inspire me to finsh my lotr auto set