Although many cinephiles may be familiar with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, it is no secret that the beloved literary work of JRR Tolkien had been approached for adaptations plenty of times before the hit fantasy movies of the 21st century. And now, thanks to an interdimensional film fan, we have a cheeky look at one of these never made Middle-earth films ‘from an alternate Hollywood timeline’ – the Stanley Kubrick Lord of the Rings movie.
For all you fake Mordor fans who may not know the Tolkien production lore, in 1968, the hit pop band The Beatles had the idea to adapt The Lord of the Rings with Stanley Kubrick set as their director. According to Far Out Magazine‘s reports, the band members would also star in the flick with Paul McCartney as the Lord of the Rings character Frodo, Ringo Starr as Samwise Gamgee, John Lennon as Gollum, and George Harrison as Gandalf.
Needless to say, their idea never got going as the band failed to require the book rights as Tolkien, “didn’t like the idea of a pop group doing his story.” And so, in this universe anyway, Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings movie was lost to the hypothetical void.
That is until a Reddit user, with the totally legitimate and not at all fake (wink, wink) power to traverse through time and space, shared pics of the film that in an alternate universe went ahead into production.
In the interdimensional pictures shared on the Lord of the Rings subreddit, we see that, despite being in the ’60s, CGI in this other universe has progressed leaps and bounds! All the members of the Beatles have had their face’s morphed onto small hobbit bodies – although they do look a bit warped and bugged-eyed in some stills.
The Orcs are bright green, and the Uruk-hai bright red. As we all know, Stanley Kubrick was a man of bold visual decisions. Granted, the style is a bit out of place for the famed filmmaker, but again who are we to argue with a universe-hopping film fan?
At the end of the day, even if you don’t buy into interdimensional travel, this post does highlight the fact that Lord of the Rings has some of the best and most dedicated fans in existence.
You can next enter Middle-earth in Amazon Prime’s upcoming TV series, The Rings of Power, which is set to premiere on September 2, 2022.