With nearly the same creative team behind the masterfully made Lord of the Rings trilogy, why did The Hobbit trilogy fall so flat for most viewers? Was it merely that the bar had been set too high by LOTR? Here are the most plausible reasons I can come up with.
1) They Tried to Remake LOTR
This is the single biggest problem with The Hobbit movies, the kernel of their woes. If not for this, they might have let del Toro remain as director. If not for this, they might have had good original score instead of derivative music with not a single memorable track. If not for this, they might have kept it as one or maybe two movies instead of stretching it into a trilogy. The money people wanted another generation-defining hit and, in their greed, they ruined any hope for The Hobbit to be good. The tone of the films does not at all match the tone of the source material. They used the source material as a plot guide while overlaying the tone and epic scale of LOTR - it just doesn't work. The Hobbit was a wonky children's story but the investors wanted another mature, adventure fantasy epic. The whole adaptation process was confused by this contradictory creative impulse.
2) Poor Source Material
The Hobbit is an inherently challenging book to adapt to the screen. For one thing, there are too many Dwarves in Thorin's company. I consider myself a hard-core Tolkien fan but I can hardly remember more than half of their names. I certainly can't connect names to the faces of actors and it doesn't help that, unlike the Fellowship, their names all sound alike, all derived in some form from the Poetic Edda. The Dwarves in the company don't really do anything in the story either. They're just sort of there because 13 is an auspicious number. The only real characters in the company are Thorin, Bilbo, and Gandalf (Balin's role in the expedition to reclaim Moria having been retconned later on). The Battle of Five Armies isn't the climax of the story either, it's more like a dessert, a bit of action for the kiddies. It's described in all of like two pages but in the movie they tried to portray it like the Battle of Minas Tirith. The Hobbit simply does not exist in the same universe as LOTR or the Silmarillion or etc. - the lore links were penciled in later by Tolkien for those other works. The episode with Galadriel, Saruman, and the Necromancer doesn't even show up in The Hobbit.
3) Over-Reliance on CGI
The LOTR trilogy was already suffering from this before it was through. In Viggo's words, The Hobbit was at least 10x worse. Characters feel weightless, their movements lacking the subtle imperfections of real people. The CG orcs look too clean, too crisp and the fact that there is not a single practical effects orc in the trilogy subconciously tells us there is no real antagonist - our heroes are just fighting a render (or worse, a dude in a suit with little balls all over it). There is no synchronization between action and audio. Weta Workshop's concepts are still just as good as the first trilogy, maybe a little high-fantasy by comparison, but their realization mostly or exclusively in CGI is extremely disappointing.
4) Creative Exhaustion with the Source Material
They should have let del Toro direct. We would have gotten an original take on Tolkien's work which is exactly what was needed because, as previously mentioned, The Hobbit and LOTR don't exist in the same universe. PJ poured his soul into the original trilogy and he didn't have any gas left in the tank for The Hobbit - the money people brought him in because they thought it would make the investment safer. As it turns out, lightning doesn't strike twice even when you reassemble the same cast and crew. I think this is probably the least important of the reasons why The Hobbit failed, the financial pressures of the studios and the political situation in New Zealand might even have been more important factors, but I won't get into that.
1) They Tried to Remake LOTR
This is the single biggest problem with The Hobbit movies, the kernel of their woes. If not for this, they might have let del Toro remain as director. If not for this, they might have had good original score instead of derivative music with not a single memorable track. If not for this, they might have kept it as one or maybe two movies instead of stretching it into a trilogy. The money people wanted another generation-defining hit and, in their greed, they ruined any hope for The Hobbit to be good. The tone of the films does not at all match the tone of the source material. They used the source material as a plot guide while overlaying the tone and epic scale of LOTR - it just doesn't work. The Hobbit was a wonky children's story but the investors wanted another mature, adventure fantasy epic. The whole adaptation process was confused by this contradictory creative impulse.
2) Poor Source Material
The Hobbit is an inherently challenging book to adapt to the screen. For one thing, there are too many Dwarves in Thorin's company. I consider myself a hard-core Tolkien fan but I can hardly remember more than half of their names. I certainly can't connect names to the faces of actors and it doesn't help that, unlike the Fellowship, their names all sound alike, all derived in some form from the Poetic Edda. The Dwarves in the company don't really do anything in the story either. They're just sort of there because 13 is an auspicious number. The only real characters in the company are Thorin, Bilbo, and Gandalf (Balin's role in the expedition to reclaim Moria having been retconned later on). The Battle of Five Armies isn't the climax of the story either, it's more like a dessert, a bit of action for the kiddies. It's described in all of like two pages but in the movie they tried to portray it like the Battle of Minas Tirith. The Hobbit simply does not exist in the same universe as LOTR or the Silmarillion or etc. - the lore links were penciled in later by Tolkien for those other works. The episode with Galadriel, Saruman, and the Necromancer doesn't even show up in The Hobbit.
3) Over-Reliance on CGI
The LOTR trilogy was already suffering from this before it was through. In Viggo's words, The Hobbit was at least 10x worse. Characters feel weightless, their movements lacking the subtle imperfections of real people. The CG orcs look too clean, too crisp and the fact that there is not a single practical effects orc in the trilogy subconciously tells us there is no real antagonist - our heroes are just fighting a render (or worse, a dude in a suit with little balls all over it). There is no synchronization between action and audio. Weta Workshop's concepts are still just as good as the first trilogy, maybe a little high-fantasy by comparison, but their realization mostly or exclusively in CGI is extremely disappointing.
4) Creative Exhaustion with the Source Material
They should have let del Toro direct. We would have gotten an original take on Tolkien's work which is exactly what was needed because, as previously mentioned, The Hobbit and LOTR don't exist in the same universe. PJ poured his soul into the original trilogy and he didn't have any gas left in the tank for The Hobbit - the money people brought him in because they thought it would make the investment safer. As it turns out, lightning doesn't strike twice even when you reassemble the same cast and crew. I think this is probably the least important of the reasons why The Hobbit failed, the financial pressures of the studios and the political situation in New Zealand might even have been more important factors, but I won't get into that.