From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings * The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context

When I moved to New Zealand from the UK in early 2004, two issues dominated local news and discourse. The first was an increasingly acrimonious dispute between the government and the indigenous Maori over the latter's claim to customary rights over the foreshore and seabed, resulting in a major protest march and the founding of a new Maori political party. The second was the nation's preoccupation with the Oscar triumph of The Return of the King, directed by ‘local hero’ Peter Jackson, which had picked up a record-equalling eleven Academy Awards.1 Despite their obvious differences, these two issues share common ground in terms of the way each signifies an apparent challenge on the part of the underdog to hegemonic power relations within particular spheres. If the former is evidence of ongoing Maori resistance to New Zealand's colonial legacy of British settlement and appropriation, the latter would seem to affirm the ability of a small peripheral filmmaking nation to make its mark in the US-dominated global motion picture entertainment industry. For from an Antipodean perspective, The Lord of the Rings temporarily wrote New Zealand into mainstream cinema history. Produced under the auspices of New Line Cinema, a subsidiary of the US-based TimeWarner media corporation, The Lord of the Rings trilogy – adapted from the celebrated novels by J.R.R. Tolkein and comprising The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) – was a mammoth undertaking. The three films were shot back-to-back over a fifteen-month period at a production cost of somewhere between US$280 and US$310 million. They have also been hugely profitable, generating earnings of more than US$4 billion when film exhibition, home video and DVD, television screenings, soundtracks and other ancillary merchandising are factored in; at the time of writing, The Return of the King, The Two Towers and The Fellowship of the Ring are ranked as the second, fifth and eleventh highest-grossing feature films of all time.2 Even more remarkable was the fact that this epic example of Hollywood moviemaking was not only directed by a filmmaker strongly identified as a New Zealander, but that the entire shoot and postproduction of the trilogy took place in New Zealand and featured, with the obvious exception of the principal cast members, local creative talent and facilities.