20 Movie Characters Completely Different From Their Source Material

It's a common problem when a novel is adapted to a film that there is not enough time for everything, and certain aspects and characters have to be reduced greatly. The Hobbit trilogy had the opposite problem however, as it turned one book into three movies, and as such had to stretch a lot of the story out.

Arguably one of the best examples of this is Radagast the Brown. One of Middle-earth's five wizards, Sylvester McCoy's character had a much more significant role on screen than he does in Tolkien's novel.

On the page, Radagast was name-dropped just once by Gandalf in a bid to earn the trust of Beorn, while not actually playing a part in the events at all. In the movie trilogy, his story is greatly intertwined with that of Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the Necromancer (Benedict Cumberbatch), another character who is barely mentioned in the book itself.

Radagast's greatest impact on the story of Middle-earth came during the Fellowship of the Ring book, where Gandalf explained how his fellow wizard was used as a pawn by Saruman to lure him to imprisonment at Isengard. Other than his love of animals, there is very little from either The Hobbit, or the Lord of the Rings source material that translates over to the films.