Love is difficult to measure, but dollars are not. Look, for example, at the box office returns for the trilogy. Fellowship began by earning $315 million in the United States. The Two Towers saw a modest increase to $342 million, which is what sequels are supposed to do. Return of the King saw only a similar increase, to $377 million. Make no mistake, $377 million is a healthy number. Most movies would cry to do such numbers. But with $342 million as a baseline and two years of pent-up expectation, it probably should have done better. Particularly considering Oscar: Traditionally, winning big at the Academy Awards has been thought to add anywhere from $10 million to $50 million to a movie's box office gross. ...
DVD sales of Return of the King have been more promising. The trilogy's distributor, New Line, declined to release sales figures for the various DVD editions, but the trade magazine DVD Exclusive reports that Fellowship sold 11.7 million copies (it's Extended Edition sold another 4.3 million) and Two Towers sold 10.8 million copies (plus 4.2 million Extended Edition copies). By contrast, Return of the King has sold 12.5 million copies. Good numbers, but not what you would expect for the most heralded edition of the franchise. You may have talked yourself into loving Return of the King when it first came out, but for most people, grubby reality has finally set in.
Hey Jonathan, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Return of the King is the final part of a trilogy. Unlike many other sequels--see the Lethal Weapons, Spiderman, Charlies Angels, etc.--you have to see the first two to understand what is going on in the third one. It is difficult to maintain momentum, let alone gain it, with any sequel, but especially with a trilogy. Ever heard of Star Wars? Take a look at those numbers. Most critics think The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the bunch, and it did the weakest at the Box Office. Is it Jonathan Last's argument that the original Star Wars trilogy is not beloved? Or was it Ewan MacGregor's massive box office drawing power that made the crappy Episode I the fifth biggest movie of all time?
The truth is that the numbers bear out a pretty clear conclusion: the Lord of the Rings started with a sizable enthusiastic audience that grew when people realized how good the Fellowship of the Ring was. Then they bought the DVD, and a few million diehards got the extended edition. Those same people, plus a few more who watched Fellowship on DVD, went back to see The Two Towers. Then they bought the DVD, and those same few million diehards bought the extended edition (including me, mostly because I thought Two Towers was the weakest of the theatrical releases but the extended edition is fantastic). And they, along with a few more who saw the first two on DVD, went again to see Return of the King. Then they bought the DVD, and a few million diehards got the extended edition (I'm probably going to watch it tonight). People who had not seen the first two because they do not like epics or fantasy or long movies were not going to all of a sudden jump in when Return of the King won the Oscar. (Let's also not forget that Return of the King was nearly three and a half hours long. That is a serious investment of time for a movie-goer. And it still made the most of the trilogy. Interesting.) In any case, more people progressively saw the movies as they came out, something has never happened for a true trilogy.
After Jonathan Last wrote that silly review last year I concluded that he had serious judgment issues (and I didn't link the review). The fact that he tried to polish up that turd with a muddled-logic "I told you so" piece only confirms my conclusion. Only now I'm calling him out on it. Lord of the Rings is the greatest movie trilogy of all time, in large part because Return of the King was such a overwhelming and glorious conclusion. Them's the facts.
3 comments:
Amen, brother. Amen.
No, on one point.
LotR is the greatest movie trilogy of all time (and I say this without having seen RotK) because it's the only one to use a coherent trilogy of extraordinarily high quality as its source material and was faithful enough to the material that it wasn't mucked up.
Most trilogies are bad serials. Star Wars seems to have a stronger plan in mind than most, but the source material is so thin that you wish it had been fewer, better, movies.
Return of the King was a popular movie, yes, and probably the most beloved of the three (or, at the very least, not less beloved than either Fellowship or Towers).
Is it the greatest movie trilogy of all time? I don't know. It's difficult to call it a "fact"... isn't it?
The problem I had with Return of the King was the overwhelming homoeroticism. Big Tent seems like a safe place to comment on this. Did anyone else think that element was overdone? Frodo and Sam's friendship, which is strong and beautiful in the book, is somehow foreign to our culture, and I found that misinterpretation to be off-putting, even damaging to the trilogy, since their friendship is so important to the book. Is this aspect worth discussing? Did anyone else feel this way?
Or am I being overly sensitive to this kind of (perhaps) revision of our works of art? I was reminded of the Coming Out Christian service I went to in Athens, Ohio, where the minister talked about David and Jonathan's love as being sexual. There's a new Lincoln bio to the same effect.
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