With ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ celebrating its 25th anniversary, Peter Jackson is again looking back at the movies that shaped the modern fantasy movie industry. For fans hoping he might secretly be sitting on an unseen “ultimate cut” of the ‘Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy, Jackson has been clear: there’s no hidden version waiting to be released.
Any hypothetical new cut, he says, would merely introduce a few seconds, hardly worth the reopening of the saga. However, that does not imply that Jackson is finished with Middle-earth. Far from it. Rather than coming back with another narrative feature, the filmmaker is looking at something that is arguably more personal and possibly equally significant to longtime fans.
Peter Jackson Isn’t Done With Middle-earth, Just Done Making Sequels
Instead of creating another epic with hobbits, wizards, or wars, Jackson has shown great interest in creating a huge documentary on how The ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies were actually filmed. It is not a brief retrospective or a promotional featurette. It’s a comprehensive, in-depth examination of the creative process of one of the most ambitious productions in the history of the film industry.
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Jackson says that there is still a treasure trove of unseen material in the archives. “The footage contains alternative takes, it contains bloopers. And it contains a bit more of a sense of the mechanics of making the films. But to this day, I haven’t persuaded the studio, because obviously it’s a big undertaking,” he told Empire. It includes alternate versions, outtakes, test shots, and unedited backstage shots that go way beyond what fans have already watched in the well-known DVD Appendices.
Although those extras were already regarded as gold-standard bonus material, Jackson claims that there is a lot more that never saw the light of day. It is not a lack of passion that is keeping the project, but scale. The biggest challenge is to persuade a studio to greenlight such a massive project.
It would take a lot of time, resources, and dedication to produce a mega-documentary of this magnitude. However, the fact that Jackson still insists on it is an indication that it is not a transient notion. It is a passion project, something he would like to create not to get success, but to leave a legacy.
Why This Might Be The Best ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Project Yet
The popularity of such a documentary is not limited to nostalgia. For most fans, The ‘Lord of the Rings’ is not only a favorite trilogy, but also a masterpiece in filmmaking. Watching alternate versions, discarded concepts, and scenes where things could have gone wrong would provide new dimensions to films that people are already familiar with. And there is the frustrating prospect of re-reading deleted or rewritten ideas.
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This includes ideas like Arwen in battle at the Deep of Helm or more flashbacks of Aragorn’s past. Better still, there is the possibility that Jackson might unveil ideas that fans have never heard about. In a fandom that has been examining each frame for decades, such a revelation is uncommon. Jackson is uniquely suited to pull this off. In recent years, he’s proven himself not just as a blockbuster director, but as a thoughtful documentarian.
His ‘Beatles’ docuseries and ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ projects showed that he could transform archival footage into something that is emotionally moving and historically significant. The same treatment for LOTR would lead to a more conclusive account of the way the movies were made. Although this mega-documentary is not officially confirmed, the fact that Jackson is still working on the franchise (producing ‘The War of the Rohirrim‘ and the next one, ‘The Hunt for Gollum’) indicates that he has not left Middle-earth.
