10 Simple Fixes That Would Have Made The Hobbit Awesome

4. Cut That Running Time

As mentioned earlier, fans of the series have already been hard at work editing the three films into something far more manageable, doing a better job at it than Peter Jackson. One cut has stripped the films' gargantuan runtime of almost eight hours to a far more reasonable three hour stretch. In that version, gone is the investigation of Dol Guldur, Tauriel is limited to a cameo performance, Azog's role is played down (he's actually dead during the events of The Hobbit) and the old Bilbo prelude is absent, while most of the action sequences have been trimmed down. The fact that someone would even go to the effort of stripping the original so significantly shows how much people care about Middle-Earth, but also how much of these movies is needless padding.