What is the title of the first film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy?

The first film in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Released in 2012, it begins Bilbo Baggins’s transformation from a comfortable hobbit into an adventurer traveling with Gandalf and thirteen dwarves.

The film adapts the opening portion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit. Thorin Oakenshield leads the company toward Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, hoping to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland and treasure from the dragon Smaug. The movie also introduces the connection between Bilbo and the One Ring through his encounter with Gollum.

The title can be confused with Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings films. The Fellowship of the Ring is the first film of that separate trilogy, while The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies are the second and third Hobbit films. Although released later, An Unexpected Journey is set roughly sixty years before The Lord of the Rings story.