10 Movies Totally Ruined By Fan Service

1. The Hobbit Trilogy

But there's no better example of runaway fan service than Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy, which represents an attempt to milk fans of every last possible dollar under the guise of giving them more of what they "want."

As if splitting J.R.R. Tolkien's novel into three brutally long movies wasn't absurd enough, all three movies are guilty of paying excessive tribute to Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, by incorporating characters into The Hobbit who have no business being there.

The likes of Frodo (Elijah Wood), Saruman (Christopher Lee), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and especially Legolas (Orlando Bloom) are given outrageously perfunctory roles in The Hobbit movies despite not actually appearing in Tolkien's book, because Warner Bros. needed to hammer home that sweet, sweet branding.

Furthermore, Jackson expanded upon material included in the appendices of the Lord Of The Rings books, while even fabricating a dreadful love triangle subplot between Legolas, Kili (Aidan Turner) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the latter being a character created specifically for the films.

The result was a trilogy of films that, in all of their obvious ambition, tried too hard to be too much, when a smaller and more restrained canvas actually would've done better justice to the source material.

This is cinema's towering testament to the mess that can be created when Hollywood zeroes in on a cash cow. And in this case, audiences bit hook, line and sinker, as they collectively grossed just shy of $3 billion.