Before anyone starts, I’ve always thought The Hobbit sucked. I was never a fan of the book, so even a semi-faithful movie adaptation was going to underwhelm me. But there are lessons to be learned by writers (and readers) from The Hobbit movies.
Recently I had a series of posts (1, 2, 3) about The Lord of the Rings movie adaptations, in which I discussed how much I enjoyed them. The movies managed to be awesome and cut out the long waffly bits. The movies were better than the book. But what about the 3 movie adaptation of the 1 book story? Well, here’s a 6 video discussion of the 3 movie adaptation of the 1 book story!
Just Write/Sage Rants dissects the flaws in The Hobbit movies. The videos highlight some of the more important aspects of storytelling and payoffs for the reader, and how they weren’t well handled.
The Characters – The Dwarves
Tensionless Action
Unresolved Plot Lines
Bad Romance
Philo$ophy of Adaptation
Comments and the Extended Editions
Tyson Adams 
Definitely with you on the Bad Romance part of things…
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Do you think part of the problem with The Hobbit is that we’ve seen three amazing movies in LOTR? Anything else is going to be terrible in comparison, and we’re judging harshly for what amounts to an okay film series.
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I think the problem with the Hobbit movies [and I’m speaking as someone who loves the book more than anything] was that Jackson made them into a LotR prequel and not a Hobbit movie [singular]. If he’d tied the title more into the Silmarillion, I think a lot could have been forgiven. The Hobbit is a children’s book not meant to be epic. And the movies forced the story to BE epic.
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Which was always going to be the risk. Jackson spent years storyboarding and developing LOTR. It is quite clear that he didn’t do anywhere near the same level of work on The Hobbit.
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