Let's be honest: The Hobbit would have made a great three-hour movie. Now that's what it is, thanks to a dedicated video editor in Philadelphia who boiled down Peter Jackson's bloated, padded trilogy into a single cohesive movie that is also truer to the book.

"After about 312 cuts and edits, new transitions I made, and re-ordering of scenes by editing while having the book open on my lap for reference, I think I've finally made the film fans were looking for, that's not only shorter but more accurate to the character of the book," says the creator of this edited version, whose email name is David Killstein. (His real name is something else, and he asked me to leave it out of the story, which is fine by me.)

Killstein argues that his version is what The Hobbit should have been in the first place. "Peter Jackson turned 1,000 pages of Lord of the Rings into nine hours of film, but how do you do that with a 300-page book?" Killstein says. "It became a quantity over quality kind of thing."

Killstein has set up a Tumblr where you can get info on how to download his version. He's also put together a trailer that shows the transition from movie #1 to movie #2, and removes the Orcs from a chase scene because they weren't there in the book.