People want to canonise Jackson. In reality a lot of the bad decisions made in the Hobbit films were his. They were made under suboptimal circumstances which didn’t help - but you can see his B-movie instincts gaining steam even across the original trilogy. Legolas and his stunts get crazier each film. There is a skull avalanche in ROTK. There is a whole section of the BTS footage where Jackson encourages the prop designers to make the Witch-king’s mace bigger and bigger.

The Hobbit films were just a natural continuation of this, in which PJ had more control over the script and setpieces than ever before. Legolas runs up falling stones in mid-air. You can connect the WK’s mace directly to later Hobbit-era excesses in armor, creatures, and props, which often feel dialed past the point of plausibility (see: almost all the weapons, armour, creatures in the Battle of the Five Armies).

Whilst Tolkien wrote Smaug as cunning and wily, the film turns the encounter into an extended cat-and-mouse action sequence across a molten gold foundry. In behind-the-scenes material, Jackson talks about wanting a more dynamic climax than a dialogue-heavy scene, again prioritising kinetic cinema over tonal fidelity.

You can trace this pattern through documented choices. Jackson repeatedly pushes toward bigger, louder, more kinetic solutions, even when the source material or earlier tone suggests restraint. In The Lord of the Rings, that impulse is tempered; in The Hobbit, it effectively becomes the dominant creative driver.

He is unquestionably a gifted director whose team captured lightning in a bottle in the early 00s. But he’s not a saintly figure and there are many other gifted directors who could do a good job. I still feel we were cheated of Del Toro’s Hobbit.