If you could change ONE thing in The Hobbit triology

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Marwhini

20 minutes a chapter (on Average) is a terribly short amount of time for each Chapter, given that some Chapters can be easily produced as nearly an hour each.

By the rules of Screenplay writing, and alteration to a script, The Hobbit should technically be a 9 to 12-hour set of movies (That is: Using the usual formulae for turning a Novel into a Screenplay, and then a Screenplay to a Script, and then the translation of the Script -> Movie, and how much time is generally given per-page of script).

Okay... I have a media background myself, and this is the first I've heard of there being any "usual formulae" that can *predictably* turn a novel into a script based simply on the number of pages. Novels are all over the place in the amount of time they cover per page, plus of course the pages themselves vary wildly in their formatting according to the whim of the publisher. Different editions of a book will have a different number of pages.

Now, there *is* a formula for predicting film length from the number of pages in the script- but that's because scripts do have standard formatting. In fact that's *why* they have it. Are you sure that's not what you were thinking of?

This is not to say that you're wrong and I'm right about whether a faithful "Hobbit" Trilogy would be viable, just that I don't believe that an appeal to abstract "rules" and "formulae" is particularly useful here. Understand that I am not dismissing your idea out of hand, either- I'm actually curious. How would you go about this? Where do you think each installment should start and end?

EDIT: But this should probably have its own thread, so we don't hijack Aaron's.