The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring opened on the 19th of December 2001, and within its first five days in the United States and Canada it had earned more than seventy-five million dollars. That number alone might suggest a routine holiday blockbuster. What it cannot explain is why a three-hour fantasy film shot entirely in New Zealand, adapted from a novel published nearly half a century earlier, would end up in the United States National Film Registry, be named one of the hundred greatest American films ever made, and go on to gross close to nine hundred million dollars worldwide.

  This is a film that rewrote what audiences and studios believed epic fantasy on screen could look like. It assembled one of the largest ensemble casts of its era, drew on a design team that had spent years building a world from scratch, and placed its fate in the hands of a director who had never helmed anything remotely at this scale. How did Peter Jackson convince a Hollywood studio to fund not one film but three, all shot at once? Why did so many famous actors turn down the central roles? And what did it take to translate a book that generations of readers had declared unfilmable into a landmark of cinema? Those are the questions that follow.

• 2. A World Built From Scratch

  ›

  In August 1997, Peter Jackson began working with Christian Rivers to storyboard the trilogy, while simultaneously directing Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop to begin constructing his vision of Middle-earth. Jackson's instruction was direct: make Middle-earth as plausible and as historically grounded as possible.

  By November of that year, illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe joined as the project's primary conceptual designers. Both had worked on editions of Tolkien's books before. Lee took charge of the film's great locations, giving the Elven cities an Art Nouveau character while bringing geometric severity to the Dwarf architecture. John Howe concentrated on the characters' armour, a subject he had studied throughout his career, and shaped Bag End and the Argonath alongside his armour work. Grant Major then translated those drawings into actual architecture, while Dan Hennah scouted the New Zealand landscapes that would stand in for Middle-earth.

  Costume designer Ngila Dickson joined on the 1st of April 1999. She and a team of forty seamstresses proceeded to produce nineteen thousand individual costumes, forty variations per actor to account for stunt and scale doubles, and each garment was deliberately worn in to suggest age and use. Filming itself did not begin until the 11th of October 1999, meaning the project had been in active physical construction for more than two years before a camera rolled on the principal cast.

• 3. The Cast That Almost Wasn't

  ›

  Elijah Wood was the first actor confirmed for the production, cast on the 7th of July 1999 as Frodo Baggins after submitting his own self-filmed audition, dressed in character and reading lines from the novels. He was selected from a pool of a hundred and fifty actors. Jake Gyllenhaal also auditioned for the role, though a miscommunication from his agency sent him in with an American accent rather than the required one.

  The role of Gandalf went through a remarkable sequence of refusals. Sean Connery was approached but said he did not understand the plot. Patrick Stewart turned the part down because he disliked the script. Patrick McGoohan declined due to health issues. Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Plummer both passed. Richard Harris expressed interest. John Astin and David Bowie auditioned. Sam Neill was offered the role and declined because of a scheduling conflict with Jurassic Park III. Ian McKellen, who ultimately took the part, had to negotiate a two-month schedule overlap with 20th Century Fox over his work on X-Men before he could commit.

  Aragorn proved equally difficult to fill. Daniel Day-Lewis was offered the role twice and declined both times. Nicolas Cage turned it down for family reasons. Stuart Townsend was actually cast and began filming before Jackson concluded he was too young and replaced him. Russell Crowe was considered but believed Jackson had no real interest in him. Viggo Mortensen entered the picture when executive producer Mark Ordesky saw him in a stage production. Mortensen's son, a reader of the books, persuaded his father to accept. Mortensen read the novel on the flight to New Zealand, received a crash course in fencing from sword master Bob Anderson, and was on set at Weathertop almost immediately.

  For the role of Bilbo, Jackson turned to Ian Holm because he remembered Holm's performance as Frodo in a 1981 radio production of the same story. Sylvester McCoy had been held as a potential Bilbo for six months before Jackson made that choice. Christopher Lee, cast as the villain Saruman, had originally auditioned for Gandalf; he was the only cast member who had actually met J.R.R. Tolkien and read the novel once a year.

• 4. Filming Across New Zealand

  ›

  New Line Cinema, the American studio that financed and distributed the film, backed a production that was shot and edited entirely in New Zealand, concurrently with the other two instalments of the trilogy. The decision to shoot all three films back to back in a single country was not just logistical; it was the reason the visual world of the trilogy feels continuous.

  The landscapes of New Zealand doubled for nearly every location in the story. The Arrow River in the Otago region stood in for the Ford of Bruinen, where the Nazgul chase Arwen on horseback. Kaitoke Regional Park in Upper Hutt became Rivendell. The open plains around Paradise, near Glenorchy, served as Lothlórien and Parth Galen. Whakapapa skifield in Tongariro National Park became the scarred landscape of Mordor in the prologue. The farming land near Matamata in the Waikato became Hobbiton.

  Before principal photography began, the lead actors trained for six weeks together in sword fighting, riding, and boating. Jackson's stated goal was to let them develop chemistry that would register on screen while also acclimatising them to life in Wellington. All nine cast members playing members of the Fellowship got a matching tattoo after the shoot, the Elvish symbol for the number nine. The one exception was John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli; his stunt double received the tattoo on his behalf, as the heavy prosthetics Rhys-Davies wore to play the dwarf had caused eczema around his eyes.

• 5. Howard Shore's Score

  ›

  Howard Shore composed the film's score, which was performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Voices, the London Oratory School Schola, and the Maori Samoan Choir, along with several vocal soloists. The scale of the recording matched the scale of the production.

  Enya wrote and performed two original songs for the film. "Aníron" appeared within the story, and "May It Be" served as the end title theme. Enya allowed her label, Reprise Records, to release the soundtracks for all three films in the trilogy. Shore himself composed an additional song, "In Dreams," sung by Edward Ross of the London Oratory School Schola.

  The score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score at the 74th Academy Awards, and Howard Shore was also nominated in the Best Original Song category for "May It Be," a nomination shared with Enya and her collaborators Nicky Ryan and Roma Ryan. Shore won a Golden Globe for Best Original Score as well, with the Golden Globe for Best Original Song also going to the same trio.

• 6. Records and Reception

  ›

  On its opening day in the United States and Canada, the film earned eighteen million dollars from three thousand three hundred and fifty-nine cinemas, while simultaneously earning eleven and a half million dollars across thirteen international markets. Its opening weekend in the US and Canada reached forty-seven million dollars, placing it first at the box office and setting a December opening record by beating Ocean's Eleven.

  It opened at number one in twenty-nine international markets and held that position for a second week in all but the Netherlands. In Australia it set a record opening day gross of two million and nine hundred thousand dollars from four hundred and five screens, breaking the previous record held by Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. In Denmark it became the highest-grossing film in the country's history at the time, surpassing Titanic. In its first fifteen days of release the film had accumulated three hundred and sixty-two million dollars worldwide.

  Critics responded strongly. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a ninety-one percent approval rating based on two hundred and sixty-nine reviews. Metacritic assigned it a score of ninety-two out of one hundred based on thirty-four critics. Colin Kennedy of Empire gave it five stars and described it as the first instalment of the best fantasy epic in cinema history. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three out of four stars and predicted it would become a cult film. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly awarded it an A grade and wrote that she had never turned a page of Tolkien but knew enchantment when she saw it. Not all reviews were without reservation: Peter Bradshaw praised the visual design but found the tone too serious and the narrative back story indigestible before the plot could take hold.

• 7. Awards and Legacy

  ›

  At the 74th Academy Awards, the film received thirteen nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, winning four: Best Cinematography for Andrew Lesnie, Best Makeup for Peter Owen and Richard Taylor, Best Original Score for Howard Shore, and Best Visual Effects for Jim Rygiel, Randall William Cook, Richard Taylor, and Mark Stetson. It also won five BAFTAs, among them Best Film and the David Lean Award for Best Direction, as well as the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2002.

  In 2007, the American Film Institute named it one of the hundred greatest American films in its history. It was notable for being both the most recent film on the list and the only film released in the twenty-first century to appear on it. In June 2008, the AFI placed it second in its ranking of the ten best films in the fantasy genre. In 2021, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, citing its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. That same year, members of the Writers Guild of America voted its screenplay seventy-sixth in their list of the greatest screenplays of the twenty-first century.

  The theatrical cut of the film sold fourteen and a half million DVD copies when it was released on the 6th of August 2002, making it the best-selling DVD at the time. An extended edition followed on the 12th of November 2002, running two hundred and twenty-eight minutes with thirty additional minutes of footage and more than three hours of supplementary material. In June 2025, the film ranked eighty-seventh on The New York Times list of the hundred best films of the twenty-first century, and fourteenth on the readers' choice edition of the same list.