10 Movie Franchises That Just Kept Getting Worse

The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest trilogies ever made, there is no doubt about that and there never will be. However, the Hobbit is not.

After Guillermo del Toro departed the project, Peter Jackson seemed reluctant to step behind the camera but seemingly found himself as the only candidate suitable for the job and was left with virtually no other choice. Then came the announcement that the original diptych was being stretched out into a trilogy when cameras had already been rolling for over a year, which set alarm bells ringing that this was purely a commercial exercise.

Although the cast do their best and there are some decent set-pieces, The Hobbit is hugely inferior in almost every way. The over-reliance on CGI at the expense of practical effects gives everything an artificial sheen, the story moves along at a painfully slow place, there are too many superfluous nods to the previous movies and you just get the sense that Jackson's heart isn't really in it this time around.

While this may be stating the obvious, The Lord of the Rings worked as a trilogy because it was three books and over a thousand pages worth of material. The Hobbit is roughly 300 pages that was dragged out over almost eight hours of screen-time, and it shows.