Extended editions

They should release a "tightly edited" version, not an extended version.

And this from someone who has watched every minute of the extended LOTR DVDs and extras about 500 million times!

There are scenes in the Extended Versions that make the films better, but there are also scenes that are just more stupid crap.

For example, the first film has a great extra scene where Bilbo looks at the shards of Narsil and has a great talk with Elrond. But there's also another added scene of dwarves going down water slides naked in Lothlorien. Lolwtf?!!!

My advice is to seek out the Maple Films fan edit that edits all the films into one 4 hour film. It's not perfect, but it's the best way to watch these films.

Download the Maple Films edit.

Do it. It’s simple, and is the Hobbit book, on film. Perfect.

They're very much like the EE of LOTR. Some scenes are terrific and should have been part of the movie, some should have stayed cut. I enjoy them a great deal, it's the only version I watch.

The extended versions of the Hobbit movies are a bit better, because they include scenes that really shouldn't have been left out of the story, but they also have scenes I wish they hadn't included too.

I mean, we all cheered when that nasty little minion to the corrupt mayor of Laketown actually died during the battle in Dale, but they left that part out of the theatrical release. He apparently tried running off in drag with gold coins stuffed in the front of his dress, but got tangled up in the battle with the orcs, accidentally got stuck on a catapult, and got thrown down the throat of a troll. A fitting end to that little shit.

We didn't cheer at all when the first film showed the dwarves bathing nude in the elves' fountain at Rivendell (no frontal, and half of them were covered up by the fountain water, but I really didn't need to see some of them from behind at all). Or we had the misfortune of the Goblin King (who is so ugly and disgusting I can't stand to look at him) having his servants play a terrible rendition of "Down to Goblin Town" and then bragging about composing it himself to the captured heroes.

What was really shocking was what they did with the extended version of movie #3, where the Battle of Five Armies included some Rated R stuff, which is kind of out-of-character for a Middle-Earth movie. Most of the violence is kept at a PG-13 level in the films, or the truly gory stuff is done off-camera.