Ranking 9 Biggest Two-Part Movies From Worst To Best

The rule-breaker of the bunch, The Hobbit was a single book that got split into three films.

The 'trilogy' featured Peter Jackson returning to the world of Middle Earth to tell the story of Bilbo Baggins. But while Jackson and his team were praised for their impressive restraint and calculated storytelling when it came to adapting each Lord of the Rings book to film, none could use any of those praises to describe The Hobbit's adaptation.

The Hobbit as a book was substantially shorter than any one of the Lord of the Rings books, yet the studios insisted Jackson turn the planned two-film adaptation (already stretching it a bit) into three (well past the world of sanity). The result is a trilogy that actively loses steam as it goes. The first film is a solid beginning, adapting some of the book's best parts, such as the three hungry trolls and Bilbo's meeting with Golumn. The second film gets a bit lost in trying to introduce new elements that weren't in the book, but at least gives audiences the iconic performance of Cumberbatch as Smaug.

But by the time the third film rolled around, the series had lost even a vague resemblance to what it started out as. The Dwarves that were once main characters were relegated to little more than scenery, and its attempts to tie into Lord of the Rings was insulting and misplaced.

(For tons more info on how these films got so much wrong, check out the YouTube channel of the incomparable Lindsay Ellis.)