The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Movies Ranked
4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Gross USA: $303,003,568
Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $1,021,103,568
3 Academy Award Nominations
3 BAFTA Award Nominations
There were a lot of immediate reactions to this film which criticised it for being a little messy and full of unrelated content. Although many criticised The Battle of the Five Armies for similar reasons, An Unexpected Journey had a different purpose to the last film in the trilogy. After an almost ten year gap since The Lord Of The Rings ended, An Unexpected Journey is our first dip back into Middle Earth; it has to set the scene and starts the story.
The Hobbit Trilogy may have been about one film too long, but this is an opinion only forged in retrospect. In this first instalment, it was exciting to see things like the rock giants fighting in the mountains and Radagast with his woodland pals being intimidated by the Spiders. It felt like a promise for all the goodness that was yet to come, it’s just a shame that the promise was not fulfilled.
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King
Gross USA: $377,845,905
Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $1,119,929,521
11 Academy Awards
4 BAFTA Awards
If you look at the facts, this is the most successful film out of the six. It made the most money and won the most Oscars. There’s no doubting that Return of the King is a brilliant film.
Featuring some of the very best battle scenes ever, closure for all our favourite characters and a bittersweet ending that sees Frodo sailing away to the undying lands without his friends to live out the rest of his life in peace, The Return of the King was one of the very best trilogy conclusions in history.
This entry to Peter Jackson’s original trilogy sits at number three despite all of this because of how The Lord of the Rings is more memorable and iconic for the moments and the journeys that are created and moulded within the first two movies, each of which are sitting pretty in our top two spots.
Recommended for you: 10 Best The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Moments
Unexpected journey should be ahead of Return of the King as ROTK is a terrible adaptation strays too far from the book and has too many convenient plot devices in it which makes it almost unwatchable