In just three films, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy gives fans a lengthy stay in the world of Middle-earth – and that’s before you even get into The Hobbit trilogy. The theatrical editions of LOTR alone total over nine hours of screentime, unspooling J.R.R. Tolkien’s grand mythology. Then you have the Extended Editions, for a total of 11 hours and a half hours. And yet, fans have long wondered if there might be even more where that came from – additional footage shot by Jackson and his crew that didn’t even make the Extended Editions. The rumoured ‘Mithril Cut’, or ‘Extended-Extended Edition’, has been spoken about in whispers, almost as mythical as the One Ring itself.
Except, according to Jackson himself, it doesn’t exist. “Are there great scenes that we never used? The answer is no,” he tells Empire in our Lord Of The Rings 25th anniversary reunion issue. “There are bits and pieces, I guess. But if you did an extended-extended cut, or whatever it will get called, it would be disappointing. It would be the extended cut with a few extra seconds of something here and there; it wouldn’t be worthwhile doing.” The reason for the rumours goes back to mentions of scenes that were shot, and have never been seen – like a young, clean-shaven Aragorn in his courtship with Arwen. “There was that, it was in Lothlórien,” confirms co-writer Philippa Boyens. “But there’s not a lot. There really isn’t,” she attests.
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What might be possible is a Lord Of The Rings mega-documentary that Jackson hopes to make one day, claiming he has plenty of footage to pore over. “The footage contains alternative takes, it contains bloopers, it contains a bit more of a sense of the mechanics of making the films,” he teases. “But to this day, I haven’t persuaded [the studio], because obviously it’s a big undertaking.” The Mithril Cut, then, is dead. But long live the Mithril documentary.