The Hobbit was never planned as just one movie. Even in the years before the adaptation became a trilogy the plan was always to have the story unfold in at least two parts. But what if that wasn't the case, and Peter Jackson went for brevity instead of a broad scope? The trailer for that epic production might have looked something like this:
With The Hobbit trilogy soon coming to a close with the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, YouTube user Joel Walden has cut together an extended trailer that gives us the sense of what it would look like if Peter Jackson had tried to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien's first novel into one ridiculously action-packed film And the results are pretty epic.
As you can see, the video is a bit heavy on footage from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - as that was the film that really set up all of the story points - but this trailer does a good job weaving in the epic highlights from Bilbo Baggins' journey to the Lonely Mountain to capture Smaug's treasure. It would be rather impossible for one feature film to contain all of the previewed sequences and do them justice - even in a three hour movie - but it's still great to see the progression of adventures, from the trolls to the goblins to the spiders to the desolation of Lake Town. Peter Jackson truly taken us on a pretty incredible ride these past three years.
There are a number of people out there who mock The Hobbit trilogy for the fact that it adapts what is a fairly short book into three very long movies, but now looking back at the experiment as a whole fans should really appreciate what Peter Jackson has done. Audiences always have complaints about the material that gets cut when a novel is adapted into a feature, but what Jackson had honestly delivered is the most accurate big screen version of The Hobbit that he could - and done so by also adding to the mythology of Middle-earth. He has also provided fans with something really epic, and there are surely many out there that will one day sit down with all three movies and watch them back-to-back-to-back An opportunity to adapt The Hobbit on this scale may never come again, so it's great that we got the most in-depth version imaginable.
Do you think that the story of The Hobbit could effectively be told as just one movie? I imagine that when The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is released on home video that at least one fan will make an attempt to do so, cutting away anything that doesn't directly move the plot forward. Until then, perhaps this trailer can just be used as a guideline for establishing what's important and what's not.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will be in theaters December 17th.
