Lord of the Rings: The brutal death scene that would have completely changed The Fellowship of the Ring

It had no place being in the film

The Weinstein Company almost made Peter Jackson include a brutal Lord of the Rings twist that would have changed the entire trilogy.

To mark the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, the film’s cast and producers spoke to The Independent for a retrospective, which sheds new light on the blockbuster.

One such revelation is that Bob Weinstein, who co-produced the film alongside his brother (the disgraced producer Harvey), wanted Jackson to kill off three Hobbits in the film.

It’s unknown which of the Hobbits would have died had Jackson been forced to include this in the finished film, but fortunately, the suggestion was thrown out.

Ken Kamins, Jackson’s manager, revealed the news in the retrospective, also stating that Harvey would “threaten to get Quentin Tarantino to direct if Peter couldn’t do it in one film that was two-and-a-half-hours”.

Kamins said this “was the exact opposite of what he initially told us he wanted”.

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ (New Line Cinema)

Elsewhere in the article, Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan all reflect on their experience working on the film, which was released on 10 December 2001.