“Every time I think I’m spoiling the film, but I’m doing it because people want to see it and they’ll see it in their home.” But, Jackson said, every addition has a detrimental effect on what he set out to make. The Extended Editions preserve that work, and are made with the understanding that fans want to see it.
To Jackson, things like Treebeard’s home and Galadriel’s gifts are indelible parts of The Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t want the footage lost forever. “I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.” “The theatrical versions are the definitive versions,” Peter Jackson told IGN in 2019. Talking about how Viggo Mortensen breaks his toe on screen in The Two Towers - something you’d only know if you watched the special edition DVDs - is a meme now.īut the Extended Editions are not better movies. There are Weta designers I can still recognize on sight today. The Extended Editions also fostered a sense of intimacy through hours and hours of filmed interviews on how the movies came together. For three years, we would pop the disc in and dive back into Middle-earth just in time to ignite hype for the next installment. And the following year, the Extended Edition DVD would hit stores around Thanksgiving break.
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They also offered a way to bring an “exclusive” version of the Lord of the Rings movies into more intimate, fans-only spaces, where we could pause and rewind, gush and cheer without fear of judgment (or just of bothering other people).Įvery year, my friends and family would see a Lord of the Rings movie just before Christmas. The extended versions of Fellowship, Two Towers, and Return of the King came out when it was still astonishing that a broader public would invest monetarily and emotionally in something that was historically niche, lowbrow, and, for lack of a better word, nerdy. Do I want to see what Jackson and his collaborators thought Treebeard’s house should be like? Yes! What about that bit where Aragorn admits that he’s nearly 90 years old? Obviously!īut when I’m sitting down for an all-day marathon, I want the tighter, better version of the movie, the one that’s engineered as a cohesive cinematic story rather than a collection of translated scenes. I am only human, and a giant The Lord of the Rings nerd. It’s still a great film, and is my go-to pick whenever someone asks, “Wanna watch a Lord of the Rings movie?”
Aragorn falls off a cliff and has a psychic conversation with his girlfriend, Faramir whiffles back and forth about the Ring, and it never quite matters. The Two Towers is baggier than Fellowship, with a few detours that have never felt justified to me. Would I have liked to catch a glimpse of Gildor and his band of elves? See Aragorn visit his mother’s grave? Yeah, of course! Do I want those scenes to cut into the delicate pacing of The Fellowship of the Ring, jarring the exquisitely balanced flow of the movie? I do not. Would I have liked it if there had been room for the scene where Galadriel gave the Fellowship gifts in Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh’s adaptation? Sure, she’s one of my favorite characters. The first act is perhaps the greatest example of seamless exposition in filmmaking ever produced, as the production covers 6,000 years of history, a textbook’s worth of world-building, and the introduction of a dozen immediately compelling lead characters.
There isn’t a wasted shot in the theatrical edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. Theatrical LotR is all killer, way less filler The way Peter Jackson really imagined it. Finished with the movie? There are dozens of hours of cast and crew interviews about the techniques used to make the film and the friendships forged on set - enough behind-the-scenes adventures for their own trilogy.īut when I sit down to watch The Lord of the Rings, I want to watch it the way it looked in the theater. They boast “deleted scenes” fully integrated with the films themselves (so big you have to swap discs halfway through, like a VHS copy of Titanic or a 1990s video game), complete with fully treated special effects and a restrung score.
The Extended Editions of the Lord of the Rings movies are legendary among the canon of home video releases, and rightfully so. This is Polygon's Year of the Ring.īut if there’s one controversial opinion the most likely to elicit a shocked gasp and an immediate accusation of being no real fan at all, it’s this one: I prefer the theatrical versions of The Lord of the Rings to the Extended Editions in the deluxe boxed set. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.