10 Iconic Villains Who Deserved Much Better Deaths

4. Saruman -€“ The Lord Of The Rings

For all of JRR Tolkien's writing success, the end of The Return Of The King is bloated and unnecessarily complex - which is precisely why Peter Jackson struggled to actually end his movie (and he cut out reams of material for the sake of "brevity.")

The source material would have required about five hours of running time for TROTK alone, so clearly some decisions had to be made to keep it brief and keep everyone interested. Unfortunately, for the theatrical cut, one of those decisions was to just sweep Saruman under the carpet and hope no-one had noticed that the all-powerful, naughty wizard was still presumably sitting in a huff on top of his castle, throwing stones at the Ents below.

He went from being the second most powerful character in the films' universe to not even getting a resolution, and we were just expected to believe he was no longer a problem.

How He Actually Deserved To Die

The source's decision to have Wormtongue stab him in the back, finally getting Saruman back for being a bit of a bully, made sure he was never really held accountable for his major crimes, and died because he called someone a nasty name a few times.

Surely that's not right.

Duelling with Gandalf might have been a more fitting end to the White Wizard scourge, or perhaps suffering Sauron's wrath for failing to deliver on his side of the deal. Anything other than the morality tale knife in the back that actually despatched him.

Though we eventually got to see Jackson's version of Saruman's death when the extended cuts were released, it still meant a compromise, as we never got to see his rule of the Shire under the name Sharkey, or his part in the rebellious battle with the Hobbits, both of which might have made nice additional chapters (perhaps for home release.)