10 Biggest Mistakes That Completely Ruined The Hobbit Trilogy

7. The Desolation Of Smaug's Cliffhanger

In making a single story into three movies, one of the biggest hurdles is finding a suitable point to end each installment. Both The Hunger Games and Harry Potter chose to embellish minor plot points (Peeta's brain-washing and Dobby's death) for their two-part final entries, but The Hobbit doesn't go for anything so creative; the story just stops. An Unexpected Journey ended only in the technical sense - there's nary an attempt as resolution - but with The Desolation Of Smaug Jackson made a creative decision that hurts the entire trilogy, particularly now the grand picture can be seen. The second film ends with Smaug confronting the dwarf company, after which, realising they were aided by the men of Laketown, he sets off to bring down fiery revenge upon them. It's a stark cliffhanger that certainly makes you want to come back for the resolution, but having seen the pay-off it's clear the ending was woefully misplaced. Smaug's decimation of Laketown is little more than the prologue for The Battle Of The Five Armies, revealing Desolation's cut to black as little more than a cheap, TV-style, marketing trick. Chucking out some of the fan-fiction love story or the not-in-the-book forge set piece and instead having Bard fell the beast at the end of the second movie would have lent the final two films their own sense of narrative cohesion and removed that distinct sense of disappointment.