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I recently watched the three Hobbit movies, having never seen them before and seeing that they were on one of the streaming services I subscribe to. They were really, really, really long. Perhaps unnecessarily so. When they first came out, I remember being one of those people who said “The Hobbit is a short book; it doesn’t need three movies that are over 150 minutes long apiece.”

I think I understand now why there are three movies.

At the point I’m writing this, I’ve just gotten to the part where (spoilers for a book written almost 100 years ago) Bilbo rescues the dwarves from the wood-elves. An awful lot has happened, and I’m not even halfway through the book. I think if someone tried to cram the entirety of The Hobbit into a single film they’d have to give things short shrift, or cut other things out. If they did either of those things, the Tolkien fans who made such a fuss over the Lord of the Rings films would throw such a temper tantrum, so the filmmakers had to decide how they wanted to handle things.

Plus, The Hobbit was written by Tolkien specifically for his kids. While it does have violence, a lot of it is sanitized. Okay, yes, Gandalf does light the wargs on fire, and the scene with the spiders does occur, but it’s pretty lightly-handled. Today’s (or even ten-years-ago’s) film audiences wouldn’t be happy with that — they don’t necessarily need grimdark all the time, but (for example) the spider scene just isn’t that scary in The Hobbit. In the film, it’s given the appropriate weight and fear level to satisfy 21st-century audiences. I’m also a fan of how the films changed Thorin’s character, making him more serious and broody — appropriately so, in my opinion. In the book he’s just another jolly dwarf on a quest, even though he’s referred to often as the hereditary king of dwarfkind. Plus, there’s room to stretch and give at least half the rest of the dwarves actual character development. (I’m curious if the romance between Kili and Tauriel is in the book, but I’m thinking probably not. I’ll find out in a few days when I get there.)

Oh, and by the way — I thought The Hobbit was only a couple hundred pages in length, but it’s actually more than 300, and the epub version I have estimated it would take me 3.5 hours to finish the book, based on my current reading habits. And I’m a fast reader; I’ve read 400-page books in three hours (if they were good enough), and I finished the last Harry Potter book in five hours. So while it might seem like overkill to make three three-hour movies out of one 300-page book, so much happens in The Hobbit that it really does need more room to breathe. Maybe not as much as Peter Jackson and company gave it, but at least some room.