10 Changes That Would Have Saved The Hobbit

Beorn was a character that appeared only briefly in the books, but even so he had a larger role than in the films. Considering Jackson had to stretch the fairly short and simple book into three extensive movies, Beorn seemed like an obvious character to expand.

Jackson hinted at Beorn's hatred for the orcs was born out of their genocide of his people. This set him up as a natural alley to Thorin and company, as well as an adversary of Azog. It was almost inexplicable why Jackson didn't go on to use this character in the later story then. Apart from his brief appearance during the Battle of Five Armies (which felt like an afterthought) we never see him after his introduction.

But imagine if Jackson had used this character to help drive the plot in the third movie. Instead of having Gandalf run around uncovering as many references to Lord of the Rings as possible, why not have him team up with Beorn to uncover the orcs plans to attack the Mountain? This would not strictly be cannon, but Tolkien didn't tell us what Beorn was doing between the time he met the dwarves and arrived at the battle.

Anything would have been better than that momentum killing scene when the Avengers... sorry, the Wizards, assemble to take on Sauron.