Running Time: 330 minutes (and counting) We all know the ridiculousness of having The Hobbit, a slim tome a fraction of the size of any one of The Lord Of The Rings books, turned into a trilogy. But while it's easy to harp on about Tauriel and all those damn appendices, ultimately it distracts from the fact that the real issue is the lack of justification. Plenty of great movies have come from slight sources; the eighteen page short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale became Total Recall. The Hobbit is long just for the sake of it, with each movie serving as a TV episode in a series rather than being a film that works in its own rights. Its defenders may be keen to implore people to wait to see the whole picture, but no one had to wait until The Return Of The King to find out if The Lord Of The Rings was good. There was no need for The Hobbit to be a trilogy and it seems increasingly apparent there was no way for it to work that way either. What could be cut? Anything added to the films with no reference to the books (dwarf-elf fan-fiction), all the small scenes turned into a big action beats (barrels and Smaug) and a lot of the appendices stuff that is only internally relevant. There's a great fan-cut in this idea. Which movies do you find too long? And which ones do you love despite their length? Let us know in the comments below.
