The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King crossed the one-billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office in February 2004, only the second film in history to reach that threshold. At the 76th Academy Awards, it swept every single one of its eleven nominations, tying with Ben-Hur and Titanic as the film with the most Oscar wins ever. No fantasy film had ever won Best Picture before. So how did a three-hour epic, shot entirely in New Zealand on a production that never stopped filming for over a year, end up rewriting the record books? And what does it say about filmmaking that a director who described himself as an arachnophobe took personal joy in designing a house-sized spider sequence? The answers run through every corner of this film's unlikely creation: the flooded riverbank where the final scenes were actually shot first, the actor who headbutted his stunt team goodbye, and the young New Zealand filmmaker whose early death quietly shaped one of the most famous songs in cinema history.

• 2. A Story Filmed All at Once

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  Filming began on the 11th of October 1999 and wrapped on the 22nd of December 2000, with all three films in the trilogy written and shot simultaneously. Peter Jackson called The Return of the King the easiest of the three to direct, because it carried the story's climax. That origin was more complicated than it sounds: the project had originally been planned as two films under Miramax from January 1997 to August 1998, with the first picture ending at Helm's Deep.

  Some of the earliest scenes intended for the film were actually among the last shot. Sean Astin's coverage of the moment Gollum attempts to split Frodo and Sam apart was captured on the 24th of November 1999, when floods in Queenstown halted work on The Fellowship of the Ring. The Hobbiton sequences, which open the story, were filmed in January 2000 at a farm in Matamata, while interiors were handled at Stone Street Studios in Wellington.

  The Battle of the Black Gate was filmed in April at the Rangipo Desert, a former minefield. New Zealand soldiers were hired as extras, and guides walked the set watching for unexploded ordnance. In June the crew moved to the Pūtangirua Pinnacles for the Paths of the Dead. The Ride of the Rohirrim was filmed in Twizel with 150 extras on horseback. Aragorn's coronation, rushed into a single day under second unit director Geoff Murphy on the 21st of December 2000, was later re-shot entirely during the 2003 pick-ups because Jackson was unhappy with the result.

  The pick-ups ran for two months in the Wellington studio car park. Jackson recalled that the design team worked 24 hours straight to prepare the right sets for each day. The final piece of footage ever shot for the trilogy was captured in March 2004, after the film had already won the Oscar, when Jackson filmed a few new shots of skulls rolling for an avalanche scene in the Extended Edition.

• 3. Building Middle-earth

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  Alan Lee and John Howe, who had earlier illustrated editions of Tolkien's books, led the design of Jackson's Middle-earth. Weta Workshop, headed by Richard Taylor, handled weapons, armour, miniatures, prosthetics, and creatures. Grant Major and Dan Hennah ran the planning and construction of the sets.

  The city of Minas Tirith was built at Dry Creek Quarry outside Wellington, repurposing the enormous Helm's Deep soundstage. That set's gate became Minas Tirith's second gate, while the Hornburg exterior became the backdrop for a scene in the Extended Edition where Gandalf faces the Witch-king. The new 8-metre-tall main Gate had a working opening and closing mechanism, with engravings inspired by the Baptistry of San Giovanni. Four levels of streets were built with heraldic motifs for every house, taking inspiration from Siena.

  The Citadel's interior was constructed inside a three-storey former factory in Wellington. Colours were drawn from Charlemagne's Chapel. Denethor's throne was carved from stone; the statues of past kings were polystyrene. The withered White Tree was built from polystyrene by Brian Massey and the Greens Department, with real branches shaped after ancient Lebanese olive trees.

  Shelob, the giant spider, had been designed as early as 1999. Her body was modelled on a tunnelweb spider, and Jackson's own children selected the final head design from a range of sculpts. Jackson, who describes himself as an arachnophobe, took great personal pleasure in planning the sequence. Shelob's Lair was sculpted from the existing Caverns of Isengard set, inspired by sandstone caves.

  The Haradrim, the men who ride the mûmakil from the south of Middle-earth, were initially designed with heavy African cultural influence, but Philippa Boyens raised concern about potential offensiveness. The final design drew instead from Kiribati, with woven bamboo armour, and from the Aztecs in the use of jewellery. The Dead Men of Dunharrow were given a Celtic influence and their underground city was modelled on the ancient city of Petra. Costume designer Ngila Dickson put Gondorian civilians in silver and black, while the armour referenced 16th-century Italian and German designs.

• 4. Scale of the Effects

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  The Return of the King contains 1,489 visual effect shots. That is nearly three times the count from The Fellowship of the Ring and almost twice that of The Two Towers. Jim Rygiel served as visual effects supervisor across all three films.

  Work on the Battle of the Pelennor Fields began in November 2002, when Alan Lee and Mark Lewis composited photographs of New Zealand landscape to build the digital arena. Jackson and Christian Rivers planned the battle using computers until February 2003, when the shots were presented to Weta Digital. What had been 60 planned shots had grown to 250. A crowd that had been modelled at 50,000 characters was now 200,000. The team pressed on, delivering 100 shots a week, 20 a day, and working until 2 a.m. as the deadline approached.

  450 separate motion captures were recorded for the digital horses alone, with deaths animated by hand. A Canadian company scanned Shelob's head sculpture at ten times the detail Weta had previously been able to capture. For the lava sequences around Mount Doom, the studio called on Next Limit Technologies and their software RealFlow to simulate the flow of molten rock.

  The miniatures department built a 1:72 scale model of Minas Tirith that rises 7 metres high and stretches 6.5 metres in diameter. A 1:14 scale version of the city was also required for closer shots. The Extended Edition sequence showing the collapsing City of the Dead contains 80,000 small skulls in a single cubic metre of set. The miniatures team finished their work with the Black Gate model, after 1,000 days of shooting. The final digital effects shot completed was the destruction of the One Ring, finished on the 25th of November.

  For the practical side, the sound of Shelob's shriek came from a Tasmanian devil. The mûmakil sound was built from the opening and end of a lion roar, while human screams and a donkey screech were layered into the audio of Sauron's fall. For the siege of Minas Tirith, construction workers used a crane to drop actual 2-ton stone blocks to capture the sound of missile impacts.

• 5. The Music and Its Making

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  Howard Shore composed the score, as he had for the two preceding films. He watched the assembly cut and had to write seven minutes of music per day to keep pace with the editing schedule. The score sees the full statement of the Gondor theme, which had appeared in fragments as early as Boromir's speech at the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring.

  The forces Shore assembled for this film were the largest in the trilogy. The London Philharmonic Orchestra played alongside London Voices, the London Oratory School Schola, and featured soloists. The mixed choir numbered 85 singers, with additional sections for all-male and all-female voices. The boy choir had over fifty members. One piece of music required an instrument invented and built specifically for the film: a fiddle with four pairs of strings instead of single strings.

  Actors contributed directly to the soundtrack. Billy Boyd sings on screen as Faramir charges toward Osgiliath. Viggo Mortensen sings during Aragorn's coronation. In the Extended Edition, Liv Tyler sings as Aragorn heals Éowyn. Featured soloists included Renée Fleming, Ben Del Maestro, Sissel Kyrkjebø, and James Galway, who plays flute and whistle as Frodo and Sam climb Mount Doom.

  The end title song, "Into the West," was written by Shore with lyrics by Fran Walsh and performed by Annie Lennox, formerly of Eurythmics. Walsh drew partial inspiration from the death of Cameron Duncan, a young New Zealand filmmaker who had befriended Peter Jackson and died prematurely from cancer. Lennox received a songwriting credit. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 76th ceremony.

• 6. Reception and Records

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  The world premiere was held at Wellington's Embassy Theatre on the 1st of December 2003. More than 100,000 people were estimated to have lined the streets, which the source notes was more than a quarter of the city's population. The film opened in the United States on the 17th of December 2003, with a midnight showing that generated around $8 million, nearly twice the first-day total of The Fellowship of the Ring from 2001.

  In its opening Wednesday alone, the film earned $34 million in the United States and Canada, setting a record that was not surpassed until Spider-Man 2 the following year. Outside the US and Canada, the film earned $23.5 million on its first day from 19 countries and set an opening-weekend record with $125.9 million over five days. That combined figure knocked The Matrix Revolutions from the top of the worldwide opening weekend chart.

  The film earned $1.118 billion in its initial theatrical run. By the weekend of 20-the 22nd of February 2004, it had crossed the $1 billion mark, becoming only the second film in history to do so after Titanic in 1998. Box Office Mojo estimated that over 61 million tickets were sold in the United States alone. The Lord of the Rings franchise as a whole reached over $2.9 billion in theatrical grosses, making it the highest-grossing motion picture trilogy of all time at that point.

  On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 94% approval rating based on 304 reviews, with Metacritic registering a score of 94 out of 100 from 41 reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a rare "A+" grade. The most common criticism in otherwise positive reviews was the film's length, particularly its extended epilogue. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars, calling it a visionary use of special effects tools. Joel Siegel of Good Morning America graded it an "A" but said it would have been his best picture of the year if it had not taken 45 minutes to end. In July 2025, it ranked at number 15 on The New York Times Readers' Choice edition of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."

• 7. The Sweep That Changed Award History

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  At the 76th Academy Awards in 2004, The Return of the King won all eleven of the categories for which it had been nominated. No film had ever swept every nomination so completely; the nine-win records of Gigi and The Last Emperor had stood until this night. The film shares the all-time record for most Oscar wins alongside Titanic, which also starred Bernard Hill, and Ben-Hur.

  Being the first fantasy film to win Best Picture was a particular threshold. The film also won four Golden Globes, including Best Picture for Drama and Best Director for Jackson. Five BAFTAs were added to the haul, along with two Grammy Awards, nine Saturn Awards, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, and the Nebula Award for Best Script.

  The film was the last for 14 years to win Best Picture without appearing on the National Board of Review's list of the top ten films of the year, until The Shape of Water won in 2017. The Lord of the Rings trilogy also became the second film series, after the original Star Wars trilogy, in which every entry won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

  The closing credits carried one unusual addition that Ian McKellen had suggested: sketched portraits of each cast member, morphing into real photographs, drawn by Alan Lee. McKellen's own enthusiasm for the idea prompted the production to commission Lee's drawings for the entire ensemble, giving the credits a handcrafted quality distinct from any blockbuster before or since.