10 Major Movie Reveals That Should've Come At The Beginning
9. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug - "The Necromancer"
When the studio split the Hobbit, a fun kids' adventure book, into three films, each trying to be like Lord of the Rings, they had to add in some subplots. One such addition follows Gandalf when he leaves Thorin and Co, investigating the mysterious Necromancer. When he finally finds the Necromancer, he discovers, to the surprise of literally no one, that the villain is actually Sauron.
In Tolkien lore, Gandalf had always left Bilbo's side to search for Sauron. It was never a secret, so portraying it as such falls flat. The biggest surprise in The Desolation of Smaug wasn't Sauran's return as this "Necromancer" figure, it was that the filmmakers' thought that audiences wouldn't figure out the Necromancer's true identity right away.
If Gandalf had been open about searching for Sauron from the start, his plotline would have been more compelling, and wouldn't have ended with a wasted reveal. Still, spending an hour of a twelve hour trilogy to discover that Sauron is the villain of Lord of the Rings shows exactly why the Hobbit didn't need to be twelve hours.