DISASTER: 'The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim' Heads To Digital After Just Two Weekends In Theaters
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was a complete and utter disaster at the box office so much so that Warner Bros. is already putting the film on sale at various digital stores including Amazon Prime Video.
According to The-Numbers, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim only grossed $15.7 million globally. It earned $7.8 million at the domestic box office and another $7.9 million internationally in less than two weeks.
The film had an opening weekend of just $4.5 million domestically. In its second weekend it declined 73% to just $1.2 million.
Its daily numbers have also significantly declined. On Christmas Eve, the film posted its worst daily total to-date with just $185,000 in grosses.
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Box office analyst OMB Reviews predicted that the film will only make “somewhere between $21 and $30 million by the end of its run. And at a $30 million budget, yeah, that’s just not going to do it. $31 million estimated losses. That’s a 2.5x multiplier. We can imaging that it’s probably going to be closer to between $40 and $50 million when all is said and done though.”
“Not the biggest flop in the world, but definitely not, I think, what they were expecting for this movie. And had they actually focused on what was in the appendices of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, if they had actually given a story and a movie that fans wanted instead of taking a random side character who was unnamed and then making it entirely about her for the sake of some type of messaging then guess what people actually would have gone to see this and been going back to it see multiple times over,” he added.
Given the film’s box office disaster, Warner Bros. is already putting the movie up for sale on digital stores.
On Amazon Prime Video, the film will be available to watch at midnight on December 27th ET and 9 PM PT on December 26th.
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Despite, the box office failure, the cope out of Hollywood, according to Variety, is that the film was “fast-tracked to ensure that New Line Cinema didn’t lose the film adaptation rights for Tolkien’s novels while Jackson and the teams behind Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies were working on two new live-action films for 2026 and beyond.”
Regardless, the film is a loser and producer Philippa Boyens and her team at Warner Bros. have no one to blame but themselves. They injected their feminist agenda and put it front and center in the marketing.
To elucidate that point, Boyens told Entertainment Weekly in June, “In the appendices where the story is drawn from, we get these quite interestingly drawn male characters, and then we get this young female character who is never named — and that was really interesting to me.”
“We know Helm has a daughter, and we know that she was central to the conflict that happened. But myself, and especially screenwriter Phoebe Gittins, were drawn to her,” she said. “We could feel the weight of being that unnamed daughter, which immediately piqued our interest: Who was she? How did she live?”
Despite comments like these, just ahead of the film’s release, Boyens went to IGN to try to put out the fires she started.
She told IGN, “There’s nothing woke about this, guys, if you’re out there.”
Moviegoers saw through it and obviously chose to find something else to do with their time and money rather than watch The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
What do you make of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim heading to digital after being at the box office for just two weekends?
i was surprised they considered this a theatrical release in the first place
Sounds like typical feminist fantasy to me and you know that Philippa Boyens knew it too else why the last minute attempt to tell possible movie goers that it's not woke? I will gove Philippa Boyens credit for releasing a trash filled feminist fantasy movie that lost teh studio less money than most feminist trash. Then again being animated no doubt helped.
Being that DISOCVERY CEO nixed Batwoman when it was as close to being done as it was, I don't think he greenlit this movie unless there might have been something with teh excuse about releasing it to hold onto the rights to LOTR films longer. I know SONY has done this with teh Spiderman stuff so it's not hard to see WB possibly being in a similar situation. It certainly would explain why WB did a animated movie versus live action.