I recently saw the second hobbit movie and I was floored. The movie was a couple hours long and Like 30 minutes of the movie were from the book. I love The Hobbit, it was one of the first fantasy novels I read and It made me really enjoy the genre, so I may be biased as to what the movie should contain but even then it was a shameless cash grab.
I get into spoiler territory here. Fair warning.
Legolas shows up in this movie. He was never in the books, not even mentioned. He is in this movie for the fan recognition dollar (like adding Darth Vader to Soul Calibur or adding C-3PO and R2D2 to the 3 prequels to the Star Wars franchise). It didn't add anything meaningful to the story, and really only served as a basis for throwing in a romance between star crossed lovers in an attempt to woo more types of fans.
The fight with Smaug under the lonely mountain, specifically when the dwarves show up and run around in a Benny Hill-esque scene and ends with them pouring molten gold (by the way filmmakers how the fuck did several tons of gold melt in only 10-ish minutes in smelters that had been off for a long ass time). Also never happened, though looked kinda nifty, and could have been solved in seconds by a little more fire on Smaug's part.
Gandalf's role in this movie was largely fluff for advertising the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I get that since the Hobbit is a precursor to the Lord of The Rings you want to add moments that hint at future events. However by adding a long fight scene in which a character we know will live (since he is in the other movies) is put in mortal danger to fabricate tension and leave a cliffhanger for the next movie your only really doing a disservice to the people watching the film and to the source material.
All of these never happened in the source material, so why did the filmmakers add them to a movie. I am sure several readers already know, but I want to vent so I am going to talk about this. They did it to make money. For those of you not in the know, The Hobbit was going to be a single movie at first, then two, and then they decided to do three movies. Personally, one movie would have cut out a lot but it could have been done. 2 would have been fine if they were both shorter than 2 hours. 3 movies however, was a stretch and so they ended up having to add a lot of fluff that but they did it to make money. The original Rings trilogy made 2.9 billion dollars just from box office, and it only cost 281 million to make. That is a metric fuck-ton of money in profit, so trying to cash in somewhere near that amount of money they are trying to extend the films as much as possible.
I am not stupid, I know that the movie industry is just that. An industry. They exist to develop a product and sell it for profit. Movies are also insanely expensive to make, and so they need to make money to at least cover expenses and get the production companies more money to continue to make movies. Herein lies the problem, and what I think it is why the movie industry is slowly dying. The reason we see blockbusters that are remakes or sequels and not original stories is that the movie producers know that they will do well because they already have. The Star Wars reboots, 21 Jump street (and 22 jump street, the sequel), Red Dawn, Fright Night, Willy Wonka, and now a new generation of movies based on fucking board games: Real Steel (Rock em Sock em Robots) and Battleship (Battleship) are all examples of these "safe bets". A belief that sticking to old concepts to cash in on nostalgia is insanely effective, but creates a limit on what will be made. Some independent movies are fascinating, creative, and deep. It is sad that they will not get as many viewers as another expendables sequel so less and less of them get made. Why do a lot of people go to franchise movies and not to original? our economy is doing poorly so spending money on a gamble film (one you don't know much about, so you don't know if it will be good) is less appealing than source material you recognize and "trust". So people will go to another reboot of spider-man (The amazing Spider-man (2012): gross domestic earnings: $262,030,663) and ignore movies like The Hurt Locker (Gross domestic $15,700,000). And when trying to get peoples attention they blow more of their budget on CGI effects and actors and end up making way less or losing money (the budget for Spider-man was $230,000,000). This may just end up hurting the industry more in the long run, as well as make it harder for new ideas to gain traction.
Thanks to crowd funding sites like kickstarter and video sites like youtube and vimeo people can get independent/original movies out into the world more easily. So at least there is a silver lining to filmmakers who want to produce a movie without having to go through industry gatekeepers.
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