10 Movie Deaths Only Explained Outside Of The Films
8. Saruman - Return Of The King
New Line Cinema
Christopher Lee's Saruman was a great, if not totally underused aspect of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He takes a pivotal role in both Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers, but Return of the King begins with his reign already at an end. Treebeard and the rest of the Ent lead their uprising against Saruman's forces, and the film wraps that arc up when they pick up the Palantir from the battlefield.
Treebeard makes a comment about Saruman's "filth" washing away, and that's that - at least in the original cut.
The extended editions of Lord of the Rings can't really be described as essential, but they do fortunately include Saruman's demise. As those who've sat through the extended films will know, the film opens with Saruman berating the Fellowship from one of his towers. Wormtongue, the sinister minister who'd been manipulating King Theodin, then emerges onto the tower, stabs Saruman in the back, and sends him falling to be impaled on a spiky wheel.
Wormtongue is then ended by an arrow launched by Legolas, but there's no mistaking that the more interesting demise belongs to Saruman.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
