There are more than a few attempts to cut down Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, though none quite so ambitious in scope as a new edit that has raised its small-but-perfectly formed head above the parapet this week. The anonymous tolkieneditor version promises to reduce the New Zealand film-maker’s interminable nine-hour-plus fantasy trilogy to a far more manageable single movie of just over four hours. In other words, someone has taken it upon themselves to transform the big-screen version of JRR Tolkien’s cosy fantasy fable into something more closely resembling the original, 250-page children’s novel, as opposed to the triptych of epic, all-action, interspecies romance-fuelled blockbusters that eventually made it into multiplexes.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/21/week-in-geek-tolkieneditor-the-hobbit-edited-version-peter-jackson