The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

Warner Bros. has announced that the inevitable extended version of Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit film, The Battle Of The Five Armies, will be released with an R-rating, contrasting with the theatrical release’s PG-13. The package, which includes the usual making-of featurettes and commentary from Jackson, explaining why a 300-page children’s novel needed to be expanded into nine hours of films, will include 20 minutes of additional footage, presumably containing something that was cut to achieve the more kid-friendly label.


The most likely culprit, of course, is footage from the movie’s big set piece battle, with Thorin Oakenshield maybe ripping a bat apart with his bare hands, or an orc getting graphically impaled on some willowy elf’s well-aimed arrow. (After all, anybody who sat through the original cut of the film is clearly begging for an even longer version of the titular war.) But it’s a lot more fun to pretend that the R-rated stuff comes from somewhere else; perhaps a fan-indulging hint of nudity from Ian McKellan, Martin Freeman, and Richard Armitage (who doesn’t seem at all averse to that sort of thing.) Or maybe a bit of Tarantino-inspired dialogue between the party of dwarves, taking a break from all this talk of dragons and battle to launch into a profanity-laden analysis of Madonna lyrics, and what they’re going to do once they’ve gotten their hands on all of that fucking gold.