8 Films That Would Have Worked Much Better As TV Shows

8. The Hobbit

As a prequel to one of the most unmistakably cinematic series of the twenty-first century, The Hobbit really should be a big screen affair. But with the direction Peter Jackson has taken, creating a long, slow-building story, it€™s becoming increasingly clear this story would work much better if treated like the other big water-cooler fantasy of the moment. The Desolation Of Smaug ended in a way that wasn€™t totally dissimilar to what you€™d expect from an episode of Game Of Thrones; massive cliffhanger, audience groans, come back next week/year. The difference is that whereas we buy incompleteness as par for the course with HBO, it€™s not what we€™re used to with films. Even though the original Lord Of The Rings work best as part of the bigger story, there was a sense of localised character development and a clear end point to each chapter. Taking Jackson€™s Hobbit as it stands (we€™re so distanced from what Tolkien intended that going all the way back to the source is a fool€™s errand), making the three three hour films into nine one hour episodes of a mini-series is not only simple (the trilogy's already pretty fragmented), but it€™d make the slower moments more enjoyable. An Unexpected Journey was improved no end by an Extended Edition that gave much-needed development to the dwarves and a run time that was a lot more palatable from a sofa than a cinema chair. Sadly, as Jackson€™s The Lord Of The Rings has become the definitive adaptation (sorry Bakshi), The Hobbit will be treated the same, for better or worse, meaning any hope of a subsequent version is unlikely.
Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.