8. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
That's right: this Christmas, we'll await the sequel of the first Hobbit movie, an Unexpected journey, and unfortunately it is sure to be another 3 hour jobby by Jackson who has managed to squeeze a 310 page book into 9 hours of screen time across three films. That itself is a miracle. This sequel picks up from when Gandalf (Ian Mckellan), Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the Dwarves escaped the Misty Mountains and the story entails the journey made to try and retrieve their gold back off the Dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). The film is sure to be another huge box office hit and one of the biggest films of the year however something tells me that after seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, this new trilogy from Jackson won't quite hit the dizzy heights of The Lord Of The Rings. Of course, it is technically brilliant and some of the visual effects are mindblowing, however some of the epicness of the Lord of the Rings has been replaced with cheesy humour and slapstick, which for me, as a massive fan of the books, is not what Tolkien had in mind for Middle-Earth.