LotR Cleans Up at AFI

bigdreamer writes "Looks like LOTR is a big hit even among non-nerds. this CNN article says it won the most awards, including Best Picture, at the first annual American Film Institute awards Saturday."

Comments

Re:Box office totals?

[inc0gnito]

According to www.chud.com, Lord of The Rings has grossed $205,500,000 as of last Monday
(box office totals are updated every Monday). This is over a three week period.
Last weekend's gross was $23,000,000.

FYI: In 8 weeks Harry Potter has grossed $300,500,000 so I don't think that LOTR has broken any records yet.

Box office stats links here!

[orius_khan]

Check out the gross income of movies that are currently in theaters here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.html

You can compare these totals to the totals of the Top 100 biggest ranking movies of all time here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice-alltime/rank.htm l

As you can see, even if it makes the projected estimates for this weekend, it will only be up to #34 in the rankings. However, it's also only been out for 2 weeks... :)

Guess it's time for me to go see it again and help bump it up one more notch...

Re:Box office totals?

[sph]

According to this LotR has grossed already over $200M in the US and almost $200M elsewhere. That's way more than the budget of the whole trilogy. Four records mentioned include the biggest Christmas day gross, and some December records. There's also an interesting comparison chart, where the film's gross history is compared against Harry Potter, Star Wars ep 1 and Titanic.

Some guy at Miramax is going to get his ass kicked for wanting to reduce LotR into one movie and driving Peter Jackson away to New Line Cinema, who were ready to fund three movies.

Re:Recency effect?

[jheinen]

FWIW, in the Waterstone poll of 25,000 readers, the LotR was voted best book of the 20th century. Not too shabby for a work that's over 50 years old.

More precisely...

[Ethelred Unraed]

To be more precise, Men were not only given a special place in Ilúvatar's chorus, but they were given the Gift of Death. This is difficult to explain (and Men had a hard time understanding it -- which is why they fell so easily under the Shadow, as many, even the Númenóreans, learned to fear Death), but the explanation goes like this:

The Elves, if they died, went to Mandos, the Halls of Doom on Valinor. (Valinor was what LotR refers to as "the West", i.e. the "undying lands" where world-weary Elves would travel on the Straight Road from the Grey Havens, aided by Círdan the Shipwright and guided by Ëarendil.) Therefore they did not rejoin Eru Ilúvatar if they died, but rather lived for eternity on Valinor, the lands untouched by death. In other words, even if an Elf is slain, he/she is not really "dead" per se.

But Men who died would leave Ëa, i.e. go beyond the circles of the world to return to Eru Ilúvatar, thus being nearer to him than the Eldar/Elves, who could leave Middle-Earth but not Ëa itself.

The Elves therefore became world-weary, longing to return to Eru, but unable to do so, while Men were only on Middle-Earth a (relatively) short time, after which they came back to him.

From one Tolkien nerd to another. ;-)

Cheers,

Ethelred

Re:Three whole awards

[hearingaid]

It's three out of twelve possible. The three awards won (which can be found here for those so inclined) were:

• AFI Movie of the Year
• AFI Production Designer of the Year
• AFI Digital Effects Artist of the Year

Winning a quarter of the available awards has to be considered "cleaning up" by any standard.

I'm a little miffed that neither Ian McKellen nor Viggo Mortensen got nominated, though; apparently the Best Movie owes nothing to its actors or its director, but rather its production design and digital f/x (which were admittedly both very good).