The Beatles wanted to make and star in The Lord of the Rings movie. That didn’t happen.
Yep, the Beatles, the most popular British band before One Direction came along, wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie long before Peter Jackson got his hands on the project. Sure, they had made their own movies before, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! both pretty successful in the musical/comedy genre. However, given the content and storyline of The Lord of the Rings, I’m not quite sure what kind of movie we would have seen if they actually were allowed to make the film. And author J.R.R. Tolkien probably thought the same thing and decided not to risk it.
I mean, especially now that we’ve seen how wonderfully Jackson adapted the book to film, it’s odd to think of John Lennon as Gollum, Paul McCartney as Frodo, Ringo as Samwise, and George as Gandalf. Not only that, but the Beatles wanted Stanley Kubrick, famed back in the 60s for directing 2001: The Space Odyssey, Spartacus, and Lolita. Kubrick’s an excellent director, but combining him with the Fab Four just doesn’t seem like a fitting match.
The other idea of having Bond man Sean Connery as Gandalf and “everywhere” man Nicolas Cage as king-to-be Aragorn just seems all kinds of wrong. Now, I loved them in The Rock. Sure, it’s a Michael Bay movie with all kinds of things blowing up and silly but humorous one-liners, but Cage and Connery knew how to work their angles against each other and it was a lot of fun to see. But it makes me cringe to think of Nicolas playing the future king of Gondor.
It seems like they agree with me, because they both turned down the parts.
In regards to the Peter Jackson films, one major piece of information that they revealed in the video was that Andy Serkis, who’s integral role as Gollum helped significantly advance the use of motion-capture in film, was originally only supposed to voice the Ring-obsessed creature. Gollum was going to be fully animated. Luckily, Jackson made the right call on that and hired Serkis for more, ultimately leading him into the role of 2nd Unit Director for The Hobbit films, as well as continuing in motion capture roles as King Kong and Caeasar in the recent Planet of the Apes movies, and leading to more performance capture roles in such upcoming movies as The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
My my, how things could’ve been for The Lord of the Rings movies and the state of movies today.
The final movie of The Hobbit film trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, is out now in theaters!
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