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Comment by SageRaven | Hacker News Reader

I was greatly peeved at how many times Jackson expanded a 1- or 2-sentence mention in the book into major scenes. See Radagast and the stone giants for prime examples.

I think a PJ-style movie adaptation of The Hobbit would have fared well as a 3-hour theatrical cut, plus some extras for the Super Deluxe Director's Extended Blu-Ray Edition.

And why the hell didn't Bilbo's actual finding of the Ring from The Hobbit match the scene from the first LoTR film? Can't Jackson follow his own freakin' canon?

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Just wait until the next Lord of the Rings special edition comes out, where they digitally insert the new bilbo actor to replace the old one.

Also, tons of additional CG characters in the foreground.

Just kidding, I don't think PJ could fall that far.

The only way for it to match would be for them to have filmed The Hobbit first, then copied footage. They changed actors too - obviously not following his own freakin' canon. Does that ruin it too? Should he have used the same actor, damn the results, to satisfy canon?

The actor is not canon. The story is.

The story in the LOTR movies was "Bilbo found the ring in a hole and Gollum yelled 'Loooost!'". There's no canon. That is not a story, it's an obviously-intentional massive oversimplification that was obviously not intended to be reused verbatim in The Hobbit.

An unsatisfying excuse: all the stories are from eye witnesses and second hand story-tellers. No wonder, there are discrepancies. Bilbo tells the finding different than Gandalf. It is like the chinese whispers/telephone game.

And the entire one armed orc subplot that was completely made up for the movie.

Not entirely made up. In Tolkien's world. Azog was indeed the leader of the orcs in Moria and he did behead Thror. However, Tolkien's story has Azog killed by Dain in that same battle. The scene at the end of the first Hobbit movie did take place in the book, but Azog was not present--if I remember right, they were just treed by some random goblins, who sang a cheery song :)

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