The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King might have several endings, but the power of its climactic Mount Doom sequence isn't lessened by the extended coda.
Peter Jackson's epic trilogy closer sees Frodo, Sam and Gollum finally make it to Mount Doom. Frodo puts the ring on, Gollum bites his finger off and then the two have one final tussle, leading to both falling over the edge.
Related: Did you spot this weird detail about Sean Bean's iconic LOTR scene?
Gollum falls into the lava with the ring, while Frodo clings onto the ledge and Sam rescues him. Sauron is defeated once and for all and some giant eagles pick up Frodo and Sam from Mordor.
But did you know that Jackson had originally planned for a darker take on this iconic scene?
As Jackson reveals in Peter Jackson: A Film-maker's Journey, he had thought about making Frodo get so obsessed by owning the ring that he killed Gollum.
"When we originally shot the scene, Gollum bit off Frodo's finger and Frodo pushed Gollum off the ledge into the fires below. It was straight-out murder, but at the time we were okay with it because we felt everyone wanted Frodo to kill Gollum," he recalled.
"But, of course, it was very un-Tolkien, because it flew in the face of everything that he wanted his heroes to be."
Jackson continued by saying that when they re-shot the sequence, they did it two different ways.
One version played out exactly as it does in JRR Tolkien's novel with Gollum dancing after biting Frodo's finger off and accidentally falling into the lava. But in the "dramatic context" of a movie, that take "seemed like a major disappointment".
In a separate interview, Jackson expanded on why they didn't follow the book exactly with this version of the Crack of Doom showdown.
"We felt that audiences – a lot of people haven't read the book, of course – would feel very let down and would actually judge Frodo badly for just sitting there watching as the ring got accidentally destroyed," he explained.
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"They'd feel that Frodo would have failed essentially in his quest, and it was an accident that stepped in. We had to be careful in the movie to keep Frodo from looking bad because of that."
So they decided on the final version we saw in the movie of Frodo going for Gollum, with Jackson telling Elijah Wood to play it "ambiguous" so we don't know what Frodo would have done if he got the ring.
Jackson added: "So we still tried to preserve what was important to Tolkien – the sense that it was the pity that [resolved the conflict].
"There's nothing that takes away from that. If Gollum hadn't been there, if he had been killed earlier, then Frodo would have just kept it. We still had the presence of Gollum being the catalyst that led to its destruction."
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is now available to watch on Netflix.
You can also buy the trilogy on DVD and Blu-ray, and the entire Middle Earth collection on DVD and Blu-ray.
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