This Video Explains Why 'The Hobbit' Trilogy Was Such a Chaotic Mess

Do we blame Peter Jackson for how "The Hobbit" trilogy turned out? Do we thank him? Sympathize with him? However you felt about those three movies, this candid behind-the-scenes video from "The Battle of the Five Armies" home release should leave you in awe that anything got made at all.

The video, called "The Problem with The Battle of Five Armies," details the story of how director Peter Jackson jumped into the filmmaking process after Guillermo Del Toro dropped out, and Jackson never had the time to catch up, never mind plan anything, the way he did with "The Lord of the Rings" movies.

As Peter explains at one point, "When you're going on to a set, very complicated, and you're winging it, you've got nothing to go on.... you've got these massively complicated scenes and you're just making it up then and there on the spot." He said he would tell the crew to take an extended lunch for an hour or so, so he could get his head wrapped around things and plot it through. "I spent so much of 'The Hobbit' feeling like I was not on top of it, [due to] the fact that I hadn't much prep and I was making it up as I went along. Even from a script point of view, Philippa [Boyens], Fran [Walsh], and I hadn't got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction, so that was a very high pressure situation."


Peter said he was able to wing it right up until they had to film an intricate battle. They started to do the "Battle of the Five Armies," but the battle itself was still a mystery since there was no plan. "Simply because I didn't know what the hell I was doing," Peter said, rather bluntly. "I mean, there's no medical answer for it. And that's the truth of it. We had allowed two months of shooting for that in 2012, and at some point when we were approaching that, I went to [our producers] and the studio and said: 'Because I don't know what the hell I'm doing now, because I haven't got storyboards and prep... why don't we just finish earlier?'"

It gave him a delay to clear his head and put something together, which explains why "The Battle of Five Armies" was pushed back several months. On top of that, Peter got sick during filming and was gone for something like six weeks, which doesn't sound surprising considering everything on his plate.

What a mess. It explains a lot, but it's frustrating that three potentially classic films were thrown together on the fly. It's amazing that they turned out as well as they did.

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