Forget The Lord Of The Rings Remake, The Hobbit Needs A Reboot

Everyone was excited when it was announced that Guillermo del Toro would direct an adaption of The Hobbit with Peter Jackson on board to executive produce. Unfortunately, there were delays upon delays, and del Toro eventually had to drop out of the project. Even worse, Peter Jackson felt extremely rushed during the filming process after del Toro’s exit, saying, “It was impossible, and as a result of it being impossible, I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all,” adding, “You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot.”

Peter Jackson’s obstacles to making the film, the departure of del Toro, and various other factors led to The Hobbit trilogy being massively disappointing for fans despite making buckets of money. The shame is that it’s easy to see a good movie in there. The cast is absolutely perfect, there are some incredible scenes like the Riddles in the Dark with Gollum, and there are moments where the film captures the adventure and fairytale-like nature of the book.

However, The Hobbit book, which is the shortest out of Tolkien’s books in the franchise, was inexplicably made into three films (no doubt to maximize box office dollars). There was a ton of fluff, superfluous plots that weren’t in the book, and shoddy, rushed CGI. This is night and day from Jackson’s original trilogy, which was perfectly paced, and everything from the costumes to the sets was painstakingly put together with a ton of care.

Now is the perfect time for Warner Bros Pictures to make it up to fans and make The Hobbit into one perfect film. You could theoretically even bring back all of the original cast members and get del Toro back on board to do it. Del Toro’s version of the film sounded ideal, as he previously spoke about his vision for it, saying it would be a “world that is slightly more golden at the beginning, a very innocent environment,” and that the film would “[take] you from a time of more purity to a darker reality throughout the film, but [in a manner] in the spirit of the book.”

Learning about what could have been only makes the reality of the Hobbit film more painful. There were so many pieces in place that could have led to the film being on equal footing to the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, but everything ended up going the wrong way. With the bad taste of that movie trilogy mostly out of everyone’s mouths, Warner Bros Pictures should make an announcement that would make everyone happy and give us the version of The Hobbit that fans deserve.