Great Goblin? Yes, THE Great Goblin. It’s a character that many Hobbit fans are looking forward to seeing in theaters and we may have stumbled on the reveal of the character design. Not me, internet sleuths. You know how it goes:

The speculation is mostly due to some French fan site that posted the images and based the hypothesis on the very first production photo that was released for The Hobbit:

The Goblin King is a huge, grotesquely bloated monster that in the years of his tyrannical rule over the miserable inhabitants of the Goblin town grew fat and flabby. The Goblin town is a collection of skew-whiff ramshackle huts deep in the caves of the Misty Mountains. He commands a bunch of foul, polluted, with scars and ulcers studded goblins.
Basically, they are bandits, they live by what they can pick up from passengers on the passes through the mountains. The Goblin King and his followers manage to capture Bilbo and the dwarves. The Goblin King is more wily and smarter than it seems. He takes pleasure in torturing his prisoners — he almost succeeds to finish off Thorin Oakenshield and his companions.

 

Via: Rama’s Screen