Did Peter Jackson nearly kill off one of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings?

It’s always tempting to wonder what might have been in the world of Hollywood blockbuster film-making. If directors were able to follow their instincts and break all the rules rather than using all the tried, tested and generally predictable techniques of screenwriting to keep the audience on their toes. What if Harrison Ford’s Han Solo hadn’t been killed off in Star Wars: The Force Awakens? The Corellian scoundrel’s demise at the hands of his son certainly raised the stakes and ensured JJ Abrams’ film would not be easily forgotten, but in retrospect might Ford’s gruff presence have grounded later instalments? It may even have made the director think twice before sparking up the narrative blunderbuss that was bringing back Emperor Palpatine from the dead in the abhorrent Rise of Skywalker. After all, Ford used to call George Lucas out on his bad dialogue – it’s tempting to wonder quite what he might have said to Abrams for even considering such ridiculousness.

What if they hadn’t killed Ripley at the end of Aliens 3, replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner, Dumbledore in Harry Potter or Bambi’s mum? These sagas might all have taken completely different turns, perhaps even turned out to be better stories for not playing the obvious death card, though – let’s face it – probably not. Still, it’s pleasing to hear this week that Peter Jackson fought against killing off one of the four halflings in The Lord of the Rings, despite the best efforts of his producers.

Promoting their new podcast, The Friendship Onion, cast members Dominic Monaghan (Merry) and Billy Boyd (Pippin) discussed Jackson coming under intense pressure to indulge in a spot of hobbit-slaughter but ultimately choosing to cleave close to JRR Tolkien’s original text, in which all the hobbits do make it to the end of the tale.

“It’s a good job that didn’t happen, because it would have been me. It definitely would have,” Monaghan told IGN. “There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me.”

He added: “I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.”

To be fair to Jackson, there is plenty going on in the final third of the Lord of the Rings – Frodo and Sam battling Orcs in Mordor, Denethor screaming off the roof of the white city, Minas Tirith and Merry and Éowyn taking down the Witch-king of Angmar – that nobody else really needs to die. Yet the film-maker took no such caution with The Hobbit, which manages to introduce such distinctly extra-textual details as elf-dwarf romance, Thranduil the elf king being able to hide his hideous scars through magic – in the book he doesn’t even have a name! – and about 60,000 goblin mini-bosses who keep turning up along the way for no other apparent reason than to expand the novel into an epic trilogy. So it really could have been a lot worse.

Fortunately the slightly younger Jackson still had just enough reverence for Tolkien’s original text to realise that killing characters off for the sake of it isn’t always the answer, especially when you’re working with a tome in which the main character (Gandalf) already has one of the most famous death-and-resurrection sequences in the history of English literature. Quite what difference would it have made if Merry had died on the Pelennor Fields (there isn’t really any other natural place in the narrative for the roguish Brandybuck to go out), or if Samwise Gamgee hadn’t quite made it home after heroically getting Frodo all the way to Mount Doom?

The truth is that fans would still be complaining about it now, more than two decades later. Just as there are those of us who wish – in retrospect – that Han Solo was still around to take one look at the latest generation of Star Wars film-makers, with their rubbish attempts at sacrilegious retrofitting, and feed them direct to the Rancor.