It’d be an understatement to say that The Return of the King fundamentally altered my brain chemistry. In December 2003, I went into it with zero context except my older brother’s lacklustre summary of “there’s a ring, everyone wants it.” The film was a family compromise: It wasn’t too much for me and my sister, or too kiddy for my teenaged brother, and more importantly it was a three-hour break in the 500-kilometre drive home from Christmas. My hometown still doesn’t have a cinema—in deference to Australian stereotypes, I was raised on a sunburnt plain so desolate it was used as a filming location for the latest Mad Max—so seeing a film at all was a rare luxury, even if I had no idea what I was in for.

I came out three and a half hours later utterly obsessed with it, in the deeply embarrassing way that only nine-year-olds can be—swept up in the drama and texture and scale of the world and the story. My sister and I tore through the DVDs of the previous two films, and discovered a whole second disc that was not the film, but the story of it. We learned through the second disc’s special features that the Middle Earth that felt so real on screen was made of silicon and painted plywood and scale models, that the cast were all regular blokes made small and hairy through camera tricks and prosthetics. We learned about green screen, forced perspective, editing, visual effects, production design, motion capture, film composition, and the many, many injuries suffered by the cast in the course of making the trilogy. Lord of the Rings were the films that made me realise films were made, that hundreds of people came together and assembled them out of glue and spit and maths. I didn’t entirely understand what Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Richard Taylor, and Andrew Lesnie did, but I knew they were the ones who’d made the film, and peeking behind the curtain didn’t ruin the magic trick—it just made it more impressive that they’d pulled it off.

It’s not uncommon to see people lamenting the fact that “we don’t make movies like Lord of the Rings anymore.” I’m doing it right now. But before mourning, it’s worth asking what exactly made Lord of the Rings so different, and what exactly people are remembering when they say it is gone.

Lord of the Rings came at a rare, perfect moment for home media. DVDs and the nascent internet had turned behind-the-scenes features into their own commodity rather than just a promotional tool—and the making of Lord of the Rings was its own rich story of constant risk and insane gambles that somehow paid off. The DVDs tiptoed around some of the details, but they still covered the fact that the trilogy was originally developed as two films for Disney-owned studio Miramax (specifically for Harvey Weinstein) before the plug was pulled by Michael Eisner over the films’ combined $180 million budget. Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh were left with one month to hopelessly pitch the project around Los Angeles, weighed down by a terrible deal that required any new studio to pay back the $14 million that had already spent on development and still give Miramax 5 per cent of the first dollar gross, half of which went directly to the Weinstein brothers. If Jackson and Walsh couldn’t find anyone, Miramax would hold onto the Tolkien rights and get another filmmaker to cram all three books into a single film. New Line Cinema’s founder Robert Shaye was interested in the series, and in Jackson’s potential as a filmmaker, but he baulked at the Weinstein’s conditions and only took a meeting with Jackson and Walsh as a courtesy. The story, as reported in the DVD special features, is that his response to their pitch was: “Why would anyone in their right mind make two movies? This is three films.”

The switch from two films to three called for a page one rewrite, and the hiring of co-writer Phillippa Boyens; but given the breakneck pace of the trilogy we now have, it’s hard to imagine how the story survived a two-film adaptation. Like many who only read the books after seeing the films, I find the adaptational changes made by Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens both efficient and effective, often upping the stakes while streamlining story beats. Moving Boromir’s death from the beginning of The Two Towers to the end of Fellowship gives the first film a definitive ending while also setting up the next; keeping Éomer and the Riders of Rohan in exile for most of Two Towers reduces Rohan to a kingdom that could easily be conquered, and gives a good reason for the tide to turn in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. This assessment is not universal—Christopher Tolkien claimed in 2012 that Jackson’s films eviscerated his father’s books by turning them into action movies for fifteen- to twenty-five-year olds, although his opinion was no doubt coloured by a years-long legal battle with New Line Cinema over unpaid profit percentages and Hollywood accounting.

According to New Line Cinema’s Robert Shaye, Peter Jackson slipped in the fact that all three films would have to be shot together at the last minute. Shaye wanted to make them one at a time, given the high financial risk of even one film, but Jackson successfully argued that the environmental impact of building roads and sets in remote locations meant they had to get the entire trilogy done in one go. Jackson promised that the New Zealand-based shoot would cost a mere $60 million per film, partly thanks to a tax loophole that the New Zealand government reportedly didn’t close specifically so Lord of the Rings could exploit it. This Herculean back-to-back shoot has become part of the Lord of the Rings mythology—a nonstop joint effort that produced three films with a consistent vision and aesthetic, a shoot that was as much a journey as the story of the film. Friendships were forged in line with the narrative, Helm’s Deep was a struggle off-screen and on, and the immersive fantasy landscapes of Middle Earth provided by New Zealand became possibly the most effective tourism campaign ever mounted. And all of this was chronicled in those DVD special features and online shorts that celebrated not just the films, but the filmmaking.

On a trip to New Zealand a few years ago, my sister and I went looking for the Lord of the Rings special features we used to watch, and found many we’d never seen. The most eye-opening was Costa Botes’s bleakly funny The Making of The Lord of the Rings, a fly-on-the-wall documentary that focuses less on intricate production design and camera tricks, and more on sobbing Second ADs who simply cannot source enough radios. It ended up cutting a little too close to the bone, since both my sister and I have ended up working in production, at least partly because of those original DVD features. When we actually found the featurettes we knew, they were flashier than I remembered, more promotional, and focused much more on the cast than the creatives, but the immersion was still there: the feeling that now you knew how the film had come together, you were part of it.

The Lord of the Rings DVDs are fallible histories—most importantly, they leave out co-writer and producer Fran Walsh, who chose not to be part of any behind-the-scenes interviews for the sake of her privacy. Her name is mentioned often, but her pivotal role in the Rings story is shrunk by her absence, and she joins the ranks of many under-recognised women who have produced films for their more gregarious director partners (like Gale Anne Hurd, Ceán Chaffin, and Emma Thomas, to name a few). The Lord of the Rings special features also leave out the part where Jackson and Walsh’s proposed budget of $60 million per film turned out to be half of what was needed, and they also leave out New Line trying to sell Jackson and Walsh’s house out from under them mid-shoot to cover the budget overruns. Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe is a marketable piece of the film’s story, a testament of his commitment to playing Aragorn; Jackson snapping at a producer to just let him make the fucking film instead of threatening to sue him doesn’t quite fit with the cuddly Tolkien nerd he is shown as in the rest of the behind the scenes material. But even in the stories that the DVD special features leave out, there’s a constant thread of creativity winning out on Lord of the Rings: of Jackson and Walsh’s pitch being so infectious that Robert Shaye asked for an extra film, of uncertain foreign investors nevertheless closing deals during set visits to New Zealand, of Jackson getting to make the fucking film and proving all the doubters wrong.

I saw Return of the King in a cinema exactly once. I did see it again a few months later at the local Services Club on a print someone in town had somehow gotten hold of, sitting on stiff fold-out leather bench seats between the Chinese restaurant and poker machines (early 2000s rural Australia really was still the 1960s). Until recently, I had only ever seen Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on DVD, on a boxy CRT TV, or a video iPod screen, all of six centimetres wide. The films still felt massive, but the smaller screen draws attention to how much the trilogy is propelled by the story and the characters—when you miss some of the spectacle, it’s easier to see that the spectacle is always in service of something, and the story survives without it. I’ve avoided cinema marathons of Lord of the Rings over the years because I have something bordering on a religious objection to the Extended Editions—Peter Jackson himself says the Theatrical Cuts are the definitive versions of the films, and the Extended Edition was created explicitly for a home viewing experience where you can pause and get up and watch each film over two nights, so if you’re going to show Lord of the Rings in theatres, you should absolutely be showing the Theatrical Cut.

Late last year, while looking for screenings of Gladiator II (2024), I stumbled across the holy grail: an IMAX marathon of the Theatrical Cuts, remastered in 4K and shown on the largest IMAX screen in the world (suck it Sydney). The marathon was not announced or promoted, and in the queue for coffee between The Fellowship of The Ring (2001) and The Two Towers (2002), a fellow marathoner theorised that the triple-bill was IMAX’s last-minute effort to recoup some of the losses from their heavy commitment to Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). It was a compelling theory, but there was a simpler answer: The marathon was supposed to promote The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024), an anime addition to the franchise whose trailer looked woefully low-res when splashed across thirty-two metres of IMAX screen.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some trepidation in the days before the marathon, because what if I was wrong? What if I’d been blinded by nostalgia, and Lord of the Rings was just … fine? What if I was about to spend nine hours being reminded that I was no longer nine years old, that you can go back but you can never truly return? I’d been burned before in 2012, when The Hobbit gave me three long hours to wallow in a feeling of quiet discomfort that I was now an adult, about to start her first real job on set, and the filmmaker who’d introduced me to the world behind the camera had, with all due respect, lost his touch.

I needn’t have worried. Lord of the Rings doesn’t just hold up. It fucking rules.

*

It is a truly different experience to see the trilogy in a cinema, with a crowd who are invested enough in the trilogy to devote ten hours to it on a Monday. Everyone there likely had a similar experience of the film’s mythology, of watching the DVDs and learning how the magic trick was done: There was an audible collective intake of breath when Aragorn kicked a helmet at the start of The Two Towers. The vibe was so good that I even managed to resist the urge to start a fight with the guy who loudly proclaimed that the theatrical version had “cut heaps of stuff” from the Extended Edition. The 4K remaster and massive screen also showed off all the minute details that I’d known were there because they were showcased in the special features, but hadn’t seen in decades of viewing at DVD resolution—the texture of the cloaks and costumes, the sweat that beads on Frodo’s forehead every time he’s compelled to use the Ring, the seamless digital stitching between different stages of practical makeup as Theoden is released from Saruman’s hold.

I also saw a lot of flaws: shots where the focus is slightly off, wides where the Hobbits are clearly doubles, the one scene where Orlando Bloom isn’t wearing his contact lenses. When Lord of the Rings was in production, George Lucas was dragging cinema kicking and screaming into the digital age on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and for all the ill-informed arguments about film vs digital since, there’s no denying that digital cinematography allows for a more “perfect” product, one that can be endlessly corrected but also more closely monitored during filming. These “flawed” shots would be caught on set or fixed in post today, but—just like the dirt beneath Frodo’s nails—the cinematic flaws in Lord of the Rings only make the world feel that bit more real. Animated and heavily CGI’d films will now add “flaws” like lens flares, focus drifts, and digital camera movements that mimic a human operator adjusting a shot in real time, but Lord of the Rings has all of that baked into it. This immersive rough-and-tumble texture of Middle Earth applies not just to its prosthetics and cinematography but also the films’ performances: Éowyn’s “I am no man” moment works because it’s followed by a feral scream and desperate stab, not the effortless clean sweep of her sword you can imagine in the same moment from a Marvel movie. There is a sincerity to the trilogy that’s sorely lacking in modern cinema, even in films that seek to emulate it. Lord of the Rings never winks at the camera, never acknowledges the tropes and literary traditions into which the story is playing—except to say that, maybe, there’s a reason those stories keep being told.

But more than anything else, I was struck by how cinematic Lord of the Rings is: The trilogy uses every trick in the filmmaking book to escalate and elevate the story. There are the obvious and much discussed perspective tricks, used to make the hobbits look smaller and miniatures look bigger, and there’s the impeccable use of shot/reverse shot conventions in the scenes between Gollum and Smeagol. But the films are also full of incredibly effective filmmaking choices: extreme closeups, push-ins on dramatic lines, vertigo shots, dutch angles, wild searching point-of-view shots that ground the audience in the character’s panic, scrappy handheld cinematography in battles, and disconcerting steadicam shots interwoven with unsettling blocking in scenes where characters feel unmoored. The camera and sound mix are what give the otherwise ordinary Ring its menace and its gravity: It dominates the frame in lingering closeups, accompanied by deep rumbles and its own alluring leitmotif. The Ringwraiths aren’t just hooded figures, they’re pure black, an expressionistic absence of image paired with an upsetting, high-pitched screech that reverberates through the speakers long after they’re gone from the screen. One of my favourite tiny technical flourishes from Fellowship is the “Galadrilight,” a specific eye-light designed by Director of Photography Andrew Lesnie for Cate Blanchett. Lesnie explained to the American Cinematographer in 2001 that:

Tolkien describes [Galadriel] by saying “no sign of age was upon her, unless it were in the depths of her eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight and yet profound, the wells of deep memory.” In order to achieve that quality, we created the “Galadrilight,” which was simply a rig of hundreds of Christmas tree lights mounted next to the camera.

The result is a constellation reflected, and only ever found, in Galadriel’s eyes, keen as lances in the starlight. But this technical flourish would be meaningless if we didn’t see Galadriel’s eyes in extreme close-ups and feel the intensity of her gaze along with the Fellowship.

Many of the cinematic techniques in Lord of the Rings are the sort of things that Peter Jackson had to use as a low-budget filmmaker, getting the most out of the limited tools he had. He might not have had money to burn on Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992), but he always had a camera, and actors, and the ability to combine image and sound in the edit to the greatest effect possible. A push-in or sudden change in sound can make a beat more impactful than any amount of CGI or sweeping crane shots. The chilling Ringwraith screech was performed by Fran Walsh in the last days of the Fellowship of the Ring sound mix, when the original sound effects didn’t stack up. The Galadrilight uses the same techniques as every photo of a cat staring in rapture at a Christmas tree. One of the most iconic shots in the trilogy is nine guys walking past a rock, but the music and time given to this moment are what make it enormous. This sweeping, cinematic approach to the filmmaking also means grounding the story in the characters, because it foregrounds their emotional journey and the actors’ performance. In the Fellowship prologue, Sauron looms over armies, but you really feel the menace of the Ring when it turns Gandalf stern or Boromir mad.

The word immersive is often thrown around when it comes to Jackson’s films, usually related back to the look and feel of the world. There is a practical reason for this, provided by the DVD special features: Weta Workshop handled almost all elements of the production design and world, from prosthetics to chainmail to VFX to bulk-buying recently detached horse tails from a pet-food factory for the Rohirrim helmets. Having one group handling all those elements together produced a whole-cloth look for the world, but the immersion and cohesion of Lord of the Rings goes well beyond just the physical elements of the production design. The cinematic shooting style emphasises the production design and centres the performances, which rely on a judiciously paced and well-written script that captures the essence of a sprawling trilogy while never losing sight of the people at its heart. When those pieces come together, the cinematic filming approach is, in turn, elevated by what it captures: a shockingly dialled-in cast and crew, who lived the nonstop shoot of these films for over a year. It’s hard not to watch the films without thinking of those paratexts, the story alongside the story waiting on the second disc of the DVD; but that becomes just another element that elevates the story being told—because, by god, they actually did all of this.

When people say “we don’t make films like Lord of the Rings anymore,” the eulogy leaves out the fact that we didn’t make films like Lord of the Rings before Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings was the singular result of a perfect storm of digital technology, international film markets, Michael Eisner’s ego, and a New Zealand tax loophole. And in the same way that every element of Lord of the Rings works together on screen, it all came together behind the scenes, too: The combined shoot that Jackson successfully snuck into the deal allowed for a consistency of vision that cannot be achieved again, not when films are now made with brand directives from studios. Worlds and merchandising titles are built without stories or characters to ground them, books are split into two or even three to create another release date, and streaming has destroyed much of the international distribution market that New Line relied on to fund Lord of the Rings in the first place. And companies are now so risk-averse that—while they will happily announce a five film series—they will not actually greenlight production, only development (with easily interchangeable directors). When New Line Cinema eventually went bankrupt trying to recreate the Lord of the Rings magic with The Golden Compass (2007), they had only committed to making one film in the trilogy, even pulling a reverse-Boromir and removing a character death from the end of the film that motivated and necessitated a sequel.

At the core of every failed attempt to recreate the Lord of the Rings magic is an attempt to create a franchise, which is something Lord of the Rings never was. It is a trilogy, not a franchise. A franchise must hold its characters in stasis so the same formula can be rinsed and repeated, just like television once did in case people missed an episode, but with on-demand viewing that balance has now tipped. Vince Gilligan set out to tell a story of Mr. Chips becoming Scarface in Breaking Bad (2008-13), and ended up defining a new generation of television about change, while the rise of cinematic universes has left films treading the same ground over and over because they can’t be sure audience have seen the last film (or television show, or Fortnite Event). As film budgets skyrocket, studios have moved towards “sure bets,” which are only ever bets that have paid out before. The Avengers will always have to face another bigger, badder, world-ending threat while making the same quips and the same character choices. Han Solo will always be a gruff smuggler with a Wookiee sidekick and a heart of gold—and even if you watch him die, he’ll be back in three years for a prequel. But Lord of the Rings constantly moves forward—Aragorn goes from ranger to king while Frodo becomes someone who has seen too much return to the safety of stasis, and the Ring moves ever onward to Mount Doom.

And it ends. The trilogy ends, where a franchise cannot. There are no sequels, because a sequel would defeat the purpose of the trilogy—for more story to happen, the hard-won victory must be lost. So instead, Lord of the Rings ends with a finality that is both satisfying and heartbreaking, because how do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?

You can revisit the films, but they are done. The story endures, because it is over.

There is a deep irony to all of this, given that the only reason I could see the trilogy again in a cinema at all was to promote Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. There’s really no point in discussing Rohirrim at all, since it’s less a film than a legal entity, created and fast-tracked so New Line Cinema and their parent company Warner Brothers could fulfill their contractual obligations to maintain the film rights to Tolkien's work. New Line and Warner have since announced plans to use those rights to make “multiple” films that will “explore storylines yet to be told," starting with 2026’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. The new film is due to be produced by Jackson and Walsh, and directed by Venom: Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis, who will also star once again as Gollum. Judging by the title, Hunt For Gollum will likely be based on an incident early in the books, where Gandalf and Aragorn try to find Gollum before Sauron does, in order to keep the location of the Ring secret. In Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, this entire story is covered in a single line.

New Line Cinema are determined to make Lord of the Rings into a franchise, partly to combat Amazon’s competing Tolkien adaptation The Rings of Power (2022-). As someone whose love of Lord of the Rings grew into a love of Star Wars, I can see a worst-case scenario (“Somehow, Sauron returned”) and a more likely middling-case scenario, where Hunt for Gollum is an expensive, unnecessary addition to the story that achieves nothing and ends just as Fellowship begins, with a de-aged Aragorn taking a seat in the Prancing Pony.

But at the heart of any attempted franchise will be a trilogy, as cinematic and immersive and complete today as it was when I was a nine-year-old overwhelmed by it. Because it is a trilogy, it endures in its own right. Even if they don’t make films like this anymore, they still made these films and they are still out there. You might not be able to return, but you can, at the very least, go back.