Why The Hobbit Movies Were So Bad...

groveChuck

U-matic Member
Jackson admits in the The Battle of Five Armies BTS that when del Toro left after nearly 2 years of pre-production, he took over and "made it up as we went along..."



In what can only be described as the most honest promotional video of all time, we find out why: the movies were made completely on the fly, without a script or nearly any advanced planning.
"I didn't know what the hell I was doing."
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9764016/peter-jackson-the-hobbit-movies-terrible-explanation
 
The first Hobbit films was one of the worst films I have ever seen. It's was like watching someone play Super Mario Bros, only better graphics.
The second one was slightly better but not much. Haven't bothered with the third...
 
The video says that at first Peter Jackson felt unprepared, but it ends with the crew taking a break for several weeks so that Jackson can collect his wits.

I liked all the Hobbit movies. But then again I refused to see the high-frame-rate versions, and after the first one, I also refused to see them in 3-D. 2-D and 24 frames per second, baby!

Also, I was amazed when the video said that the Lord of the Rings had 3 1/2 years for prep. I knew that they shot all three at the same time. Even then I was amazed that New Line fronted so much money for such a long time. Millions and millions of dollars for years, with no guarantee of making it back. But also to give 3 1/2 years for just prep also is very luxurious.
 
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Also, I was amazed when the video said that the Lord of the Rings had 3 1/2 years for prep. I knew that they shot all three at the same time. Even then I was amazed that New Line fronted so much money for such a long time.

The movie was going to be made by Miramax, and was being prepped, then it got tangled up in rights issues so PJ went to Universal to make King Kong. That stalled, the rights were solved, but then Miramax couldn't come up with enough money to do all three, so it stalled again until it wound up at New Line. By then it was ready to go, so New Line didn't really put up money for all that development time, it just took that long to get fully financed.
 
Look at the lord of the rings trilogy books. 3 ginormous books, 3 long movies. The hobbit is one tiny book, half the size of any of the lord of the rings books, but they turned it into 3 movies. All the added crap that is not in the books is what made the movies so bad. The battle of the five armies should be a 5 minute scene not an entire movie.
 
Though as thrown together as the final film was, I guess Jackson fared better than Gilliam's seven unsuccessful attempts to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. :undecided

OTOH, Gilliam's making-of turned into the feature doc Lost in La Mancha, as opposed to a DVD extra/YT video.

Maybe Jackson can get a debacle doc (ie Burden of Dreams, Hearts of Darkness) out of Five Armies.
Not that Fitzcarraldo and Apocalypse Now were debacles, but the shoots were particularly, well... challenging to say the least...
 
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