Lord Of The Rings Theatrical vs. Extended!

[Daaark]

Originally Posted by aimforsilence

an extra hour longer

Don't shoot me, but I find the theatrical cuts to drone on too long already. I'll defer to Kevin Smith who refers to it as 9 hours of watching people walking.

Books and movies are different types of media. With a book, you read bits at a time and set it aside and it doesn't matter how long it is. And Fantasy literature is famous for taking a paper thin plot and padding it with pages of useless information.

If Die Hard were written in the style of fantasy epic, the main villian would have 50 pages of back story detailing the history of his blood line, to be expanded upon in a set of 6 prequel books.

Bruce Willis would have hundreds of pages of fluff about being someone special, and being destined to save everyone, and his back story would be told in a further prequel trilogy.

The building they fight in would have a long drawn out history. You'd know who built it, what conflict had to be resolved to settle the town that it was built, the long, drawn out, made up religions of the builders, etc...

You'd end up with Die Hard + 5 hours of fluff.

LOTR is best suited for a mini-series. As a movie, it's 6 hours of some midgets on a hike, with 150 unimportant subplots playing out around them.