Your post made me think of how many horror/thriller movies can spend 2 hours with someone being stalked, the suspense building and building. (But let's rule out "found footage from Middle-earth" this case.) Since that's commercially proven over and over, why not draw out more "The Hunt for Frodo" from Bag End to Rivendell into its own movie? I do like the pursuit of Frodo as it builds, which is why the flood at Bruinen is such an emotional release and triumph for me as a reader--those bad guys have been haunting me for hundreds of pages, and they finally get their due!

People will debate about what to do with Bombadil, but the Barrow Downs sequence fits in so well with the whole creepy aspect of the hunt for Frodo, even if it was a blunder by the hobbits and not an explicit part of Sauron's plan. Cinematically, I think a lot could be done with the Barrow--the darkness yielding to a sickly light, the treasures heaped about that are both appealing and repulsive, the hand crawling toward the sword while Frodo is paralyzed with fear. All of that would make for good cinema.

The one area of the book that I love, The Council of Elrond, I must admit would not make for good cinema in its entirety. While I gnash my teeth with the existing movie at how cursory it is, I think 98% of movie viewers wouldn't want to watch the whole thing, so compressing it was the right move, even if it makes me gnash my teeth.

I agree that the Fellowship film compressed or omitted many fine parts of the first two books, to get the story into one commercial length film.

I don't follow your thinking that Two Towers and Return of the King weren't equally compressed, with a lot of very good writing and situations left out for timing and structural reasons.

For all its flaws, the Jackson LotR project gets a lot of credit for deciding on 'three volumes, three films'. The initial impulse by other producers had been that, of course, one book = one film, at whatever cost.

The downside to expanding The Lord of the Rings to even more than three films is the continuing necessity to structure each screenplay as a standalone film, with its own beginning, middle, and end and with increasing amounts of connective material to remind audiences, seeing the films up to a year apart initially, how each film is continuing the larger story. The film trilogy was not made to be binge-watched, although God knows plenty of people probably now do that via the recordings.

Perhaps your ideas for a larger Fellowship will be realized if and when LotR is remade as a TV or streaming series!

But yes, I have written some - mainly for the first film, but the other five are planned out entirely: except that the final film still presents a serious difficulty. But mainly, the first film, in its most simple form, would be Frodo trying to get to Rivendell while being pursued by the Black Riders. The drafts themselves are currently scattered around, so piecing them together into a presentable form would be difficult, but I could message you most of the basic stuff: a synopsis and all that.