The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has lamented the decline of physical media, saying “they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now.”
Jackson, who spearheaded extended features and editions on physical media with the hugely popular The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD releases, spoke to IndieWire about the impact of their demise.
“You can get Blu-rays and DVDs, but they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now,” Jackson said. “Since they only sell small numbers, no studio wants to put extended features on them or to extend the cuts. We did hours and hours of behind-the-scenes material for The Lord of the Rings DVDs, and so many people have thanked me for doing them. People would watch that stuff over and over again because it inspired them to make films. That’s all gone now, and I think it’s a real shame.”
Extras can of course still be found on the home releases of some big movies. For example, just this week we learned the home release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie includes over one hour of behind-the-scenes bonus content. But certainly there are fewer Director’s Cuts and extended editions of movies than there used to be, and that, as Jackson suggests, is tied up in the decline of physical media.
Jackson, though, sounded philosophical about this shift, suggesting it was inevitable as streaming essentially replaced the home video market.
“But the industry has always changed,” he said. “When sound came in, people were writing all these articles about how sound is ruining films. It was the same when color came along. People were writing very intelligent articles about why color was an abomination and how it ruined the film industry. So, it just happens all the time.”
While the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s Extended Editions add hours of extra material, even more footage was shot and never released. But Jackson recently ruled out yet another version of his iconic adaptations, insisting a full re-release of the films with those unseen scenes would just “be disappointing.”
“Are there great scenes that we never used? The answer is no,” Jackson told Empire. “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.”
Jackson did say, however, that he’d like to revisit the making of the trilogy one day in a fresh documentary that could contain unused material. “But to this day, I haven’t persuaded [the studio], because obviously it’s a big undertaking,” he concluded.
Perhaps with next year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which Jackson is working on, we might see a few eye-catching extras and maybe even an extended edition of its own emerge following the theatrical release.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
