10 Movie Scenes That Fans Tried To "Fix"

7. The Bilbo/Smaug Confrontation Is Structured More Like The Book - The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

The Edit

There have been numerous concerted efforts to "de-bloat" Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy, by removing the excess subplots and, ambitiously, even trying to combine the three films into a more manageable single movie.

But perhaps the most intriguing single editing project pertaining to The Hobbit is this bold attempt to restructure the confrontation between Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) at the end of the second movie, The Desolation of Smaug.

The re-cut scene truncates much of the film's third act down into a mere 13-minute sequence, holding on Bilbo and Smaug rather than continually cutting away to other characters, while also re-editing the dialogue to match more closely to Tolkien's book.

Did It Work?

Totally. This keeps the focus trained more intently on the encounter audiences actually care about, and effortlessly cleaves away a lot of the guff present in the final movie leading into the Laketown sequence which kicks off the third and final film.