Into the Lyraverse

When I started looking into the various different adaptations of His Dark Materials that preceded the current TV series, I was interested in one specific part of one adaptation in particular: the much-derided 2007 feature film The Golden Compass, and its ending, which is probably the most notable thing about it apart from the fact that its box office performance played a big part in New Line Cinema getting merged into Warner Brothers. In the book, and indeed most adaptations, Lyra's friend Roger is killed when Lord Asriel severs him from his daemon in order to tear a hole in the Northern Lights that leads into another world... but whilst this sequence was filmed for the movie, it was cut during editing (various contradictory explanations seem to exist as to exactly why -- some sources say it was too depressing a note to end on, others claim that test audiences were confused and thought the meaning of the sequence was that Lyra had died and when she followed the opening into the other world she was actually ascending to Heaven). The stated intention was to open the sequel with it instead, but we all know how that turned out.

Whilst the deleted ending has never resurfaced in whole, there are still glimpses of it in the trailers:

In addition: the video game which accompanied the film was based on the shooting script rather than the apparently quite last minute re-edit, which means it is significantly closer to the original book. The game still does not depict Roger's death (perhaps a sequence that can only end in your friend's death did not work as the final level of a video game), but does go on a little longer than the original film, and also retains the original edit's structure (Lyra visiting Bolvangar before Svalbard) so it is worth looking at one of the various walkthroughs on YouTube. In a case of history repeating, the game's makers, Shiny Entertainment, were bought out by Foundation 9 and merged with another company to form Double Helix Games not long after its release. The video game does boast some interesting members of its voice cast: with Dakota Blue Richards and Freddie Highmore the only members of the film's cast to reprise their roles, Lord Asriel and Tony Costa were voiced by Chris Edgerly, who has provided various additional voices for The Simpsons since 2011, and it is the only place you can hear Nonso Anozie's performance as Iorek Byrnison; he was also meant to voice the character in the film, but at the insistence of the studio he was replaced by Ian McKellen.

There is one other tie-in piece of media that depicts portions of the original ending: The Golden Compass Movie Storybook, adapted from the film by Kay Woodward (author of many other childrens' books including, brilliantly, the Robot Wars tie-in book The Ultimate Guide from 2002). We do not quite strike gold here, but we do get a little closer:

This version has pretty clearly been sanitised given the context in which it's appearing, so it's difficult to take much about how Roger's death was meant to look onscreen from it ("Roger was gone" could mean virtually anything). Based on the rest of the book, my guess is that the line about the possibility of a world where Roger is still alive (not present in the original book or any other adaptation) was probably written for the film, as a way of cushioning his death rather than something they meant to follow up on. Note that the two pages pictured above use illustrations, whereas every other page of the book uses screengrabs taken from the movie -- were images from the climax unavailable? No illustrator is credited, so is this concept art? Had the decision been made to cut the ending when this was being written? Unless there's a re-release of the DVD, this is probably as much of that ending as we're ever going to see.