Youtube Friday – Cast and Crew Reflect Upon The Hobbit

To be blunt – The Hobbit trilogy was a pretty major disappointment achieving neither the commercial, critical or pop culture success of The Lord of the Rings a decade earlier.  Although I am more fond of the Hobbit films than most people and would rather we got what we did as opposed to nothing at all, it’s clear that they were a significant cut below The Lord of the Rings in terms of quality.

This excerpt from the Battle of the Five Armies EE gives some insight into what went wrong.  It seems the team never really recovered from the time Guillermo Del Toro stood down as director and were constantly scrambling to meet production deadlines.  When I cast my mind back to the making of The Lord of the Rings they had plenty of time to do reshoots, recast Aragorn, tinker in the editing room to make sure they got everything just right.  With The Hobbit, it appears that an exhausted and ailing Peter Jackson was simply doing what they could to put out a finished product on time.  As a result, the final product suffered.  You can practically see him aging over the course of this video.

I appreciate Weta being candid about the film’s shortcomings.  It doesn’t always come together perfectly and I admire their openness in acknowledging that.