10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes
8. Stretching Two Movies Into Three - The Hobbit
The success of The Lord of the Rings movies left everyone wondering when Peter Jackson would get around to adapting The Hobbit into a film, though in a classic monkey's paw moment, the decision was ultimately made to adapt the book into an entire trilogy of films.
Given that The Hobbit was a single novel and shorter than any of the Lord of the Rings books, a two-film adaptation was already pushing it.
But with Guillermo del Toro originally attached to direct and Peter Jackson taking up the mantle following his departure, it was easy to have faith the text would be done justice.
Yet shortly after principal photography on the duology wrapped, Jackson announced that The Hobbit was now a trilogy, with the director going on to shoot 10 weeks' worth of additional scenes adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's appendices published in the back of The Return of the King.
Though the resulting trilogy of films were monstrous box office hits - grossing almost $3 billion combined - the general critical and fan consensus was that the three movies were wildly bloated.
Clocking in at a total of almost eight hours, the trilogy was criticised for straining to deliver three epic blockbusters worth of quality content.
Surely the single most divisive addition was Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel, an original character inserted into the trilogy by Jackson who ends up embroiled in a cringe-worthy love triangle subplot with Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Kili (Aidan Turner).
Looking back, it's clear that the three-movie split was made purely for cynical commercial reasons than because there were a trilogy's worth of stories to tell.