Cutting Saruman out of Return of the King's initial theatrical release was dumb

I've loved Lord of the Rings for as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, my dad read the book to me. Growing up, the only LotR visual media were the two Rankin-Bass animated movies (which I love) and the Bakshi animated movie (which is... ok). So Lord of the Rings has been a big part of my life even before Peter Jackson's movies came out. I love all of his movies too, especially Fellowship of the Ring (which I genuinely have no complaints about). Return of the King is great, but I feel like it's the most "problematic" of the movies both in terms of adapting the source material and just choices made as a movie (for example, I've always hated how Denethor was handled).

But one of the biggest issues I have is cutting Saruman out of the theatrical cut of Return of the King. It just makes no sense! Like, I totally get that certain scenes need to be cut for time or story issues, but Saruman was one of the main antagonistic forces of the first two movies... hell, he was really the antagonistic force of The Two Towers. To have his (theatrical) conclusion summed up in a throwaway line by Treebeard at the beginning of the movie just always felt... wrong to me. Going back to what I said before, I 100% understand cutting scenes if it ruins the pace of the movie. And if this scene was at the end of the Return of the King movie (like in the book), I'd totally understand saving it for the extended edition home viewings. But this takes place at the beginning of the movie. I guarantee that no one sitting in the audience would be sitting there thinking "oh come on this has nothing to do with the rest of the movie*, and it's such a longgggg scene" (*I think that Saruman planting the seeds of doubt in Gandalf sending Frodo and Sam to Mt. Doom is definitely an important part of the narrative, but maybe that's just me).

I guess it doesn't *really* matter because the scene did make it to the extended cut. It just seemed like a silly thing to cut because it does conclude Saruman and Wormtongue, and also showed the power of Saruman's voice and his manipulative abilities. I think it weirdly bothers me when other people aren't bothered by it lol but I tend to have "contrarian" opinions.

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