[Zigûr]

I know no one's posted in this thread recently but I didn't think this was worth starting a new one for.

Supposedly it's revealed on the Extended Edition Blu-Ray (in the bonus material I suppose) that that ludicrous scene in this film where Smaug was chasing the Dwarves all around Erebor was one of the things added in after they'd shot the original two films when they decided to pad it out to three.

No wonder it feels so tacked on and the ending is such a cop-out (Smaug leaves to attack Lake-Town for no discernible reason when he could have deep-fried the majority of Thorin and Company right then and there).

What really astounds me, however, is something that struck me when watching 'An Unexpected Journey' too. This film went for two hours and forty-one minutes. They can't have filmed that much extra material after the three-part decision was made. That would mean that even before the 'trilogy' decision, they probably had enough material to make three films anyway, probably one and a half to two hours each. But no, they're the successors to Peter Jacksons 'The Lord of the Rings,' so they have to go for nearly three hours each because that's just how long a 'Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film' has to go for. Obviously shorter films would make it harder to justify a trilogy as well, even if they actually already had enough material. So that's how we ended up with all this filler. The original excuse, that they had so much anyway that they thought it was better to make three films rather than two, surely doesn't hold up when it's outright stated that turning it into a trilogy wasn't about saving material from the cutting room floor but actually involved producing more padding to artificially extend the runtime.

I think this is what Baudrillard called Pure Simulation.