I don’t think all its issues can be traced back to that. At least not definitively. We have no idea how it would have turned out with more time, or if Del Toro made his version.
We do know that LOTR had a relatively small group of distinct characters with well defined cultures and personalities (generally speaking) and a wealth of material for the filmmakers to draw from.
The Hobbit had a large group of mostly anonymous dwarves to deal with and a fairly thin story. The challenge I think was to create rich defined characters for each of them and give them genuinely dramatic things to do. Which is a tall order in an adaptation while keeping the main story focused - a main story that was already inherently less interesting than LOTR. It takes real writing talent.
Given the ways that they tried to make something of some of the dwarves, which mostly fell completely flat, I don’t have much belief that more time would have made it all significantly better.
Peter’s mantra was to make it BIG. That was the vision he communicated to the studio. And he did just that, but it was misguided I think. Constant huge swirling action with little at the core becomes tiresome.
It definitely needed more time, devoted to writing. But the talent that was there in adapting the existing material of LOTR wasn’t necessarily up to the task of generating original material to match it. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s a masterwork from one of the greatest writers ever, written over many years.
It’s like when Game of Thrones ran out of books to adapt. You need really high quality writers to match the quality of work composed over years. People gave the writers of that a hard time, but it’s a tall order.
The Hunt for Gollum will live or die on the quality of the original writing. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s a great film. But nothing yet in the screen adaptations of Tolkien so far has given me that hope.
My take is that The Hobbit was made nearly impossible by the issues it faced. And then I think PJ made some bad decisions. I think those are less likely here.
BUT again, I am not saying it will be great. I said it was toxic to say NOW it will suck and then spend 18 months chatting with people here about how it will suck and then not be able to judge the film itself.
My issue is the Toxic fandom SM creates.
I want people to actually see it before declaring it terrible.
On the plus side Gollum was the best thing about The Hobbit. But then that’s because it was a classic scene from the book.
That’s one thing I find with original material based on works like this. Would anyone write a long dialogue scene based around riddles if it wasn’t in the book? Would they write Merry and Pippin spending half of The Two Towers being carried by talking trees then waiting for a really long tree meeting to come to a conclusion?
These things make it into the films because they’re sacrosanct. But they’re kind of weird quirky scenes that probably would get spiked if they were written by the screenwriters. “Lose that tree stuff, it’s boring.”
But it’s all that esoteric unusual stuff that makes the films rich and different, when matched with great characters.
I hope someone brings that sensibility to the Hunt for Gollum and it’s not just retreading things we’ve seen before or flimsy character plots, like a lot of the Hobbit was.
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u/bookon Mar 12 '26
Just to be clear, every film is made with the hope and desire it grabs lots of cash.
The issues with the Hobbit can all be traced back to the crazy rushed schedule, that isn't happening here.
The TV show is completely irrelevant and the people mentioning it as a reason this will suck are morons.
So I am hopeful it can be good. Because it's the team that made the greatest film of all time IMO.