Lightknight said:
So you're saying he doesn't, in fact, like money anymore?
No, I'm saying he has access to so many ways of gaining obscene amounts of money that he didn't have to spend another three years exhaustively tramping across huge uninhabited swathes of New Zealand in order to get it. If money was
all he was after, he has many easier and faster ways of getting it than three Hobbit movies produced on the same scale as LotR.
Johnny Novgorod said:
Yes, it all makes sense, in a technical, hand-wavy sort of way ("Oh, Legolas would be around", "Oh, we should show Gandalf's actions, even though we could not and let him be the mysterious character he was written as", "Oh, we could totally stretch every single setpiece to turn an adventure story into an action story"). I can't get over the fact how unimportant Bilbo, The Hobbit, is. I love Martin Freeman as Bilbo but he's pushed aside for the most part even though he's supposed to be the main protagonist and narrator of the story bearing his name. We see more of Legolas and "Tauriel" in the new trailer than we do of Bilbo. And speaking of the trailer - they show they're going as far as Bilbo stepping into Smaug's lair. So what's the third movie going to be about? 170 minutes of the Battle of the Five Armies, which Bilbo totally didn't miss in the novel?
Again, a lot of the LotR stuff was treated this way. Hell, they even gave totally different characters different lines in LotR. They moved the Old Man Willow scene to the Fangorn so that Treebeard could recite a few of Tom Bombadil's lines, in order to pay tribute to that event. That was not only the wrong place and wrong character, but also the wrong
film since that was in the Two Towers, and Tom Bombadil should have been in Fellowship.
While I also adore Martin Freeman as Bilbo, I don't feel he was neglected at all. Yes the Council of Elrond took up time, but it was used to explain how he and the dwarves got out of Rivendell even though Elrond wasn't going to allow them to go on. Yes it took them a while to get out of Goblin Town, but how else could they have stripped that down? They had to fight their way out, and it wasn't as though they were near a door. And then Bilbo's role in the battle against the wolves was greatly increased from what it was in the book. In the book, the eagles basically hear the racket they were making and pick them out of the trees. But in the movie, they had Bilbo fight to make the finale about him and to finish his arc with Thorin. While a lot of the story wasn't about Bilbo, they made sure both the beginning and end were all centered around him.