10 Essential Parts Of Movie Franchises (That Weren’t Introduced Until The Sequel)

8. Mo-Capped Gollum - The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers

The Iconic Element: Over ten years on, it's clear that the biggest influence of Peter Jackson's seminal The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy is in motion capture. The process of using an actor's performance as a blueprint for animation had been around since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, but Gollum pushed things a step further, digitising it fully and pushing the interactions with regular actors to new levels. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a big blockbuster that doesn't have some role achieved by an actor wearing ping-pong balls. Gollum was always one of Middle-Earth's most captivating denizens, but when it was Andy Serkis behind those desperate eyes, he was taken to the next level. When It Was Actually Introduced: Although the Gollum seen in The Two Towers and The Return Of The King (and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) is brought to life by the revolutionary process, the version of the character seen briefly in The Fellowship Of The Ring is a little different. That Gollum, glimpsed in the prologue and in the Mines of Moria, is actually an earlier take on the character, designed before the Serkis version was finalised (that's what happens when you make three movies released years apart at the same time). You can tell if you study the shots of the character, but it's not enough to ruin the series' continuity (Jackson waited until The Hobbit before doing that).