Even-longer versions of The Hobbit movies returning to theaters this fall

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy ended last December with Battle of the Five Armies, closing the metaphorical book on movies that aped, but couldn't recapture the spirit of The Lord of the Rings movies from a decade earlier. According to Variety, though, the movies will be back in theaters for a brief stint in October. The special extended versions of An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and Five Armies will play in 500 theaters on October 5th, 7th, and 13th, respectively.

These movies aren't without their highlights—Martin Freeman is excellent as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch is a legitimately terrifying Smaug—but they're sandwiched in between hours of overwrought, slow-motion battle sequences, gratuitous cameos, and extraneous material pulled from elsewhere in J.R.R. Tolkien's writings. They were also tonally inconsistent, something that comes from adapting a relatively short, light story for older children into a three-film epic. If there was one thing these movies didn't need to be, it was longer.

As Variety notes, the October 13th showing of Five Armies will be viewers' first opportunity to see the extended edition of the film; the extended versions of the other two are already available as digital downloads as well as on DVD and Blu-ray.