Is there any way they could have had Imrahil and Beregond in the movie?
 

Rohan got two minor(in the movie) characters such as Háma and Gamling. Why couldn't Gondor also have Imrahil and Beregond, even if their role was minor.

Snarky answer: they spent all the Gondor budget on tomatoes.



Legit answer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Because realistically, they could totally have named a random soldier "Beregond" and given the fans another character to fan over. Imrahil might be a little more difficult, because he has a bigger background and a higher rank that would be weird if left unexplained. Is Ingold a character? I don't remember the movies well enough, but he's another name that could easily have been attached to a 2-second cameo by soldier#6 to feed the fans.

It's not the abundance of named characters that makes an adaptation good. Actually, the adaptation that's been occupying my free time and post-count on the Mirth forum is very good despite taking the minimalist route in terms of actually naming all of their referenced characters / events / places. But knowing the movies' style and desire to include a Tolkien name, I am honestly not sure why they didn't capitalize on the Gondor characters.

Return of the King, the movie, already had too much going on in it. Deciding to end Two Towers with Helms Deep meant that a lot of that book had to be moved into Return, and in turn Towers had to be padded (hence stupidity like Aragorn-falls-off-a-cliff).

Adding extra characters to Return would have only made this worse. Especially characters that, at this late stage (an hour into the third movie), don't play a huge role in the main plot. The alternative was a complete restructuring of the second and third movies. Not going to happen either.

They could, without too much restructuring, have made the Swan-knights a visual presence in Minas Tirith, distinctive in their armor (something like, maybe, Gothic plate), with a recognizable leader who was present in the high councils, and left it at that.

But, no, Gondor's cavalry were to be mere redshirts for Filmamir's idiotic suicide charge.

Imrahil's presence would also have contradicted the film's presentation that the whole of Gondor was one city in the middle of nowhere and a second city in ruins.

Putting Jackson himself aside, the more I think about the films, the more it occurs to me that things are the way they are in them not just because it would be more "cinematic", or what have you, but because, meaning no offense to them, supposed "Tolkien experts" Boyens and Walsh literally didn't understand what was written in the book.

From the very intro to the first movie: "And nine rings were gifted to Men, who above all else desire power."

BZZZZZT!!!!! Wrong!

Have they read nothing of what Tolkien himself said? Over and over again he said that the book was about Death; Death and the Machine; Death and the desire for Deathlessness. What Men desire above all else is immortality- hence the tragedy of Numenor, hence the lure of the rings that tempted the Nine to their dooms: a cheat, a false 'immortality.'

Of course, had they read JRRT's letters, they might also have noted "the failure of poor films is often precisely in... the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies."