I really wanted to hear what r/screenwriting had to say about the Hobbit recut that has been making waves on the internet as of late.

For those who haven't been paying much attention, some plucky video editor took it upon themselves to turn the 3 Hobbit movies into one, single epic. One book, one movie, all that you need, and it is a remarkable work. While the edit itself is nowhere near definitive, and it sacrifices much in terms of pacing and thematic payoff, the end result was a single movie that I enjoyed far more than any of the original movies on their own.

What the Hobbit recut shows more than anything is that stories, and I feel this is particularly relevant to anyone working in genre fiction, don't need to be bloated with subplots and endless exposition to be effectively moving. Cutting out the shoehorned love triangle between Tauriel, Legolas, and Filli, excising nearly every scene with Azog the Defiler, abandoning the needless foray into Dol Goldur, only when watching the movie without these subplots do you realize just how little they impacted the story.

The other big takeaway I got from watching the recut is that action scenes are largely needless when there's nothing else happening. The barrel ride scene from the Desolation of Smaug and a good portion of the battle scenes from Battle of the Five Armies was cut. While I feel the BoFA cuts were a little too liberal, paring down the barrel ride scene did so much to make that particular part of the movie flow so much faster.

These were some of my initial takeaways just from watching it, and it really made me look at my own script and wonder how much more could stand to be cut, how much fat might be in need of trimming.