7. Don't Make Trilogies When You Could Make Single Films
The Hobbit was supposed to be one of the film events of the year - and that went doubly so when it was going to be one movie. Then it became quickly obvious it was going to be two movies, and some of us groaned, while others celebrated the added room for Peter Jackson to expand on Tolkien's universe using the appendices from the Lord of the Rings books and the wider Middle Earth texts. But then he announced that there would be three films, and it all started to get a little bit beyond belief. Yes the Lord of the Rings trilogy was one of the best cinematic events ever made - and it
Changed Cinema Forever - but trying too hard to replicate that was one of An Unexpected Journey's biggest downfalls. It wasn't a terrible film by any means, but it wasn't what it could have been, and one of the reasons was its over-extension: there is no reason The Hobbit couldn't have been two films, if not one, and as Thomas Jefferson said "the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." We've taken to the subject quite well round these parts, focusing on exactly what went wrong with the Hobbit. Here's just a selection of some of the best Hobbit articles:
The Hobbit: 6 Mis-Castings That Ruined It (And 4 That Were Perfect) The Hobbit: 20 Blunders That Ruined An Unexpected Journey The Hobbit: Where Did It All Go Wrong? This point is actually also transferrable to the Batman franchise - as well as ignoring the urge to reboot, Warners should take a leaf out of the Bond book as well as the original comic source and make episodic films, rather than trilogies. That way we needn't see the origin story again, and villains could return in future without complaint that we'd seen them before.