The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies - 5 Reasons It's Awesome (And 6 Why It Sucked)

3. It's The Shortest Of The Six Movies

Fans the world over rejoiced when it was announced a few weeks ago that the final Hobbit movie would be clocking in at a "mere" 144 minutes, leaving it roughly 20 minutes shorter than any of the other 5 movies in the series, and a whole 57 minutes shorter than the 201-minute conclusion to the original Rings trilogy, The Return Of The King. Many expected that The Battle Of The Five Armies would, as the finale to the entire Middle-Earth franchise, likely run in at a similar length to Return, but after squeezing one movie's worth of content into three, Jackson apparently couldn't wring anymore time out of the story, and mercifully kept this one short for the standards of the franchise. As mentioned, it's clear that Jackson isn't messing around from the opening Laketown sequence, and though there's still the feeling that PJ could have cut it down even further to perhaps 130 minutes, it's easily the most tolerable of the three Hobbit movies as a result, with the action-to-dialogue ratio being pretty close to equal.