8 Early Drafts That Almost Ruined Great Movies

The Lord Of The Rings just has to be a trilogy. Forget the source - maintained box office success, a wheelbarrow full of Oscars and culture legend are enough to prove that.

But when Peter Jackson first went to New Line Cinema, he pitched it as a duology (with the first film covering Fellowship and The Two Towers, the second Return Of The King). In fact, it had been this way since the project was first proposed; a pre-planned trilogy was just such a fantastical idea in late-1990s Hollywood. Legend goes that New Line encouraged expanding the series to three because it fit the books better, but like everything previous it was actually economical (spread the costs and make more profit), although that doesn't take away the ultimate artistic triumph this allowed.

Things were almost even more extreme, however. The project had previously been a Miramax, and when pre-production spending on this version ballooned, the Weinsteins got cold feet and demanded two films become one, cutting entire sequences (Helm's Deep was gone) and parsing down major elements (Rohan and Gondor became a single nation). Jackson thankfully backed out (and even used the work done as proof-of-concept), but just imagine the disaster that would have been.