Topher Grace Has, For Fun, Edited The ‘Hobbit’ Trilogy Into One 2-Hour Film

People do all sorts of different things to relax. Me, personally? I  light some candles and incense, chuck on Last Podcast on the Left, get in the bath, and smash a bunch of beers. Topher Grace? He edits trilogies down to more palatable single films.

In an interview with IndieWire, Grace revealed that, after working on BlaKkKlansman, he decided to decompress by masterfully (our words) cutting down the not-quite-excellent Hobbit trilogy into one two-hour movie.

Grace said that playing real-life KKK Grand Wizard David Duke made him super depressed. “I was probably a terrible husband at the time,” he told IndieWire. “It was so disturbing to go home and turn on the news to see how his ideology was affecting us at the moment.” And what makes everyone feel better? Obviously, it’s editing a mediocre fantasy trilogy:

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.

Grace was of the not-very-rare opinion that the trilogy was a bit stretched out:

I think that maybe The Hobbit should’ve been one movie, and many people would agree. Money drives a lot of those franchises. It’s better when the art leads.

This is not Grace’s first foray into editing existing films, he also did this in 2012 when he cut the Star Wars prequels into an 85-minute long film that he got to screen once before the copyright spooks got to him.

Because of those aforementioned copyright spooks, there’s almost certainly no way we’ll ever see what this edit actually looks like but Grace himself is of the opinion that it’s “a lot tighter“, which is almost certainly going to be true when you make the whole trilogy half an hour shorter than the shortest movie in it.

What a weird, beautiful man.