Topher Grace reedited the Hobbit trilogy into a two-hour movie

In 2003, the world took in The Return of the King, the final film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was critically lauded and won 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, still the highest number of wins for any single movie. The trilogy was also a box office success, bringing in near $3 billion on a budget of $281 million.

Then, in 2012, Jackson returned to Middle Earth with The Hobbit. But instead of adapting Tolkien’s comparatively brief children’s book into a single movie, Jackson made a new trilogy, this one filled with forced love triangles and new battles to pad out the runtime. They didn’t go over nearly as well critically, but still cleaned up at the box office, once again netting almost $3 billion, albeit this time on a budget of $745 million. Still, for all their faults, people still watched these films, including me.

The most enduring complaint about these movies is that they are too long, and should never have been a trilogy. Enter Topher Grace, the guy from That ’70s Show.

Grace took it upon himself to reedit the trilogy down to size, God bless his soul. As he told IndieWire, this came about when Grace landed the role of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. Grace said that playing such a hateful person for weeks on end caused him a lot of emotional duress. “I was so depressed. I was probably a terrible husband at the time. It was so disturbing to go home and turn on the news to see how his ideology was affecting us at the moment.”

So the actor found an outlet for his stress and edited Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy down to a tight two hours. “I don’t know what other guys do. Go fishing? For me, this is just a great way to relax. There’s something really zen about it.”

This isn’t the first time Grace has reduxed a trilogy. In 2012, he turned George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy into an 85-minute film. It was only screened once for “industry insiders” before it was slapped with legal restrictions. Still, there is a version of that cut floating around the Sarlacc Pit that is the internet, should some intrepid explorer wish to seek it out.

We’re probably no more likely to get a legal version of Grace’s Hobbit cut than we were of his Star Wars cut. And that’s fine with Grace, who didn’t do any of this for money. “I think that maybe The Hobbit should’ve been one movie, and many people would agree,” he said. “Money drives a lot of those franchises. It’s better when the art leads.”

Preach, brother Topher. Preach.

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