10 Behind-The-Scenes Dramas That Failed To Derail Famous Movies

9. Peter Jackson Was "Winging It" With The Hobbit Trilogy

The Hobbit Martin Freeman
New Line Cinema

While The Hobbit trilogy was nowhere near as good as The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, it was solid, and each film in the series earned a bucketload of cash.

This can't have been the outcome that the filmmakers expected, however, given the enormous amount of pressure they had to endure while piecing the movies together.

Problems on The Hobbit began when Guillermo Del Toro - who had been preparing the movies for many years - left the project before filming began, forcing Peter Jackson to step in and take over.

The problem is, Jackson was given barely any prep time of his own - he had to work with what Del Toro had already done, start from there, and then rush the movies into production.

He was essentially making someone else's movie and was not given the necessary time to be able to fully execute his own vision, resulting in the director having to plan the movie as he was shooting it.

Jackson himself has even admitted that he was "winging it" for most of the production, so it's a small miracle that three good, financially successful movies were even salvaged from this enormous, Smaug-sized mess.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!