But at least that potential adaptation has a visionary director attached, right? The presence of Peter Jackson is going to convince producers to take a chance on this, right? So that’s strike one- The Lord of the Rings isn’t terribly well known outside of the nerd circles, and few studios are interested in making a commitment to adapt all three books of the series. You can hardly blame a company like Disney for saying, according to Fran Walsh, that “fantasy films don’t make money.” People on the street wouldn’t be expected to know the characters, or be able to grasp all that Elvish nonsense. It’s a trio of long, unwieldy, densely populated 1950s countercultural novels, in a genre (fantasy) that was largely seen as lacking any form of blockbuster potential. And something like The Lord of the Rings? Its profile was far lower than even those comic books.
Comic books, in this era, were still viewed by the majority of filmgoers (and producers) as the sole domain of the acne-ridden male nerd, rather than fertile ground for mass appeal summer action spectaculars.
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We were still a couple years away from the 2000 release of Bryan Singer’s X-Men, which must be considered the starting point for the modern superhero movie genre, and even further from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, which would solidify “nerdy” superhero films as bonafide blockbuster material in 2002. It was the late 1990s when Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh were trying to sell their dream project-an adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, filmed entirely in Jackson’s native New Zealand, which he recognized would contain all the diversity of scenery necessary to bring Middle Earth to life. It’s absolutely vital to consider the era here.
They saw dusty British-shudder- literature, which was never going to put butts in seats.
When the average studio exec looked at The Lord of the Rings, the last thing they were seeing was blockbuster material. Film producers and studios of the late 1990s and early 2000s, on the other hand? They looked at The Lord of the Rings and saw a confusing morass of nerdy, underground niche culture, totally unaware that within a few decades nearly every summer blockbuster was going to be built around properties fitting that exact description.
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Tolkien’s imagination as a vast, untapped, incredibly valuable suite of cinematic world-building tools, but that’s from the perspective of people who have watched the MCU turn C and D-list superheroes (Drax the Destroyer? Jessica Jones?) into beloved cultural icons in the course of a few films or TV series. Today, we’d look at the collected works of J.R.R. One of the easiest misconceptions regarding the development of the LOTR trilogy is the assumption that studios would have been scrabbling over each other in a fight to be the first to produce such a lucrative IP. We should acknowledge just how lucky we are that he made these films exactly when he did.Īn Unknown Director, an Undervalued Property Peter Jackson pulled off something nearly impossible, something that would probably never happen today for a bevy of reasons. In fact, as you tally up the factors that were working against Jackson and LOTR at the time, it becomes clear that the eventual faithfulness and smashing success, both critical and commercial, of this trilogy were nothing short of miraculous. As we begin to approach the 20-year anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring’s 2001 release, we should recognize just how much hindsight bias is present in how we tend to view Jackson’s trilogy today … not to mention how profoundly different these films would likely have turned out if they began production just a few years later. The Lord of the Rings is the basis for almost the entirety of all modern fantasy fiction tropes-how could it not translate into billions at the box office? Signing off on producing that trilogy must have been the easiest of all decisions, right? After all, we now live in a time when seemingly any property with minimal recognizability or cultural cachet has been, or is currently in the process of being shaped into a piece of cinematic confectionary, when the opportunities afforded by a “shared universe” of characters and settings has never been more clear.
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Tolkien was always bound to be adapted into a series of blockbuster smash hits. Looking back on director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2020, some 13 years into what we might as well dub the “Marvel Cinematic Universe Era,” it’s all too easy to make the assumption that a valuable IP like the works of J.R.R. This piece from the Paste Vault was originally published in February 2020.
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