Minor Accident During Production Of 'The Hobbit' Injures Two

If someone tells you Peter Jackson's The Hobbit is blowing up, they might mean it literally. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, via the New York Times, an explosion occurred Tuesday in one of the production workshops of the fantasy prequel, resulting in minor injuries to two people. The fire department was on the scene at Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, where production is taking place, and the two people were taken to the hospital. Read more after the break.

According to reports in the Sydney Morning Herald (with a heads up from the New York Times) the Hobbit publicist said that "a couple of the guys" were drilling a statue in the workshop and sustained "mild burns but nothing serious." She added that calling the incident an "explosion" was a "slight overstatement" considering that one of the men had "some burnt nostril hairs." With that injury there's a risk of smoke inhalation, so he was taken to the hospital.

Jackson's film is at the very beginning of an monstrous shoot leading up to the release of two films in December 2012 and 2013 respectively. Though filming began almost two months ago, the shoot is so big that Jackson and his crew are still casting several roles, such as Stephen Fry playing The Master of Laketown and Martin Freeman's Sherlock co-star Benedict Cumberbatch in an unnamed part.

Incidents like the one described above most likely happen all the time on film sets, especially ones that require so much physical creation and design. It just so happens that, with a movie that's under the microscope as much as the prequels to three of the biggest movies of the last decade, things are magnified just a smidgen.