8 Classic Movies That Were Released Unfinished

4. The Hobbit

After the success of The Lord Of The Rings, Peter Jackson famously went back to his reams of content from the New Zealand shoot and produced some arse-punishing cuts of the trilogy that are now widely regarded (at least in book-fan circles) as the definitive screen versions of the tome. I can't in all good conscience include these, because, while the Extended Editions were made from footage shot initially, they were motivated by the success of the films and thus qualify instead as post-release director's cuts. The same is not true of The Hobbit.

Knowing Middle-Earth fans were more than happy to double-dip, Peter Jackson explicitly made The Hobbit incomplete, with twenty minutes or so cut from each complete film saved for their own Extended Editions. It's not little things either - there's entire plot turns that only make sense with the added scenes. He'd have gotten away with it too, if people had given up on the prequel enterprise by the time The Battle Of The Five Armies came along.

Which Version Is Better? It sounds perverse given how stretched Tolkien's children's book already was, but making The Hobbit longer actually improves it. There's a greater sense of the world and a variance to the pacing that makes the whole thing (especially An Unexpected Journey) much more palatable - think of it as a ten-episode TV series. Still not that great though.