While cleaning up my desktop, I stumbled upon a calculation I did after the Hobbit movies came out. What I wanted to find out was how many words in the book would be used for each minute of the movie. Seeing as The Hobbit is a much shorter book than the LOTR trilogy, it would seem that there would need to be a fair amount of padding to make three feature length movies out of it. So, let’s see:
| Runtime in minutes | Words in the book | Words per minute | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Fellowship of the Ring | 178 | 177227 | |
| The Two Towers | 179 | 143436 | |
| The Return of the King | 201 | 134462 | |
| LOTR total | 558 | 455125 | 816 |
| An Unexpected Journey | 169 | ||
| The Desolation of Smau | 161 | ||
| The Battle of the Five Armies | 161 | ||
| The Hobbit total | 491 | 95022 | 194 |
And there you have it. LOTR has a “content density” that’s over four times higher than The Hobbit.