The Lord of the Rings: Peter Jackson faced pressure to kill a Hobbit

Last Updated on August 10, 2021

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, which… makes me feel all kinds of old. I still remember going to the theater for the midnight premiere of the movie and just being absolutely blown away. Here was a fantasy world full of creatures and magic that felt real and genuine; I'd never seen anything quite like it. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy was a huge success thanks to the work of director Peter Jackson and everyone involved, but that doesn't mean that the studio didn't try forcing a few changes of their own.

Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd recently spoke with IGN about The Friendship Onion, their new Lord of the Rings podcast series, and revealed that at one point, the studio was pressuring Peter Jackson to kill off one of the four Hobbits. As we know, that didn't happen, which Dominic Monaghan is especially grateful for because he feels that if one of the Hobbits had been killed off… it would have been him.

It’s a good job that didn’t happen, because it would have been me. It definitely would have. There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me. I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.

There were several moments in The Return of the King where Merry and Pippen (or any of the characters) could have met their end, but I think we can all be thankful that everything went according to J.R.R. Tolkien's story. To be fair, Peter Jackson did make a few of his changes to Tolkien's work, but changing the fate of one of the major characters is perhaps a bit much.