'The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim' Tracking For Abysmal $17.5 Million Opening Weekend
The upcoming animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim film is tracking for an abysmal $17.5 million opening weekend.
Box office analyst Shawn Robbins at Box Office Theory shared his early tracking predictions believing the film will only gross between $15 million and $24 million in its opening weekend. He specifically predicts the film will only gross $17.5 million.
As for its total domestic box office haul, Robbins believes it will bring in between $44 million and $84.5 million. He specifically notes it will do just $49.5 million.
Robbins explains that “the anime approach with this prequel is likely to hinder what is usually a broader audience appeal for the Lord of the Rings franchise.”
However, he adds, “Still, the medium has proven strong even with lesser known titles in the domestic market, so Rings could attract some attention here as a counter-player perhaps not dissimilar to how Godzilla Minus One aided the market late last year.”
What Robbins does not point out is that the Tolkien Estate and Amazon MGM Studios have also done significant brand damage to The Lord of the Rings with their The Rings of Power television series.
The series currently has a mediocre 6.9 out of 10 rating and an unweighted 6.5 out of 10 on Amazon-owned IMDb.
It has a rotten 49% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Furthermore, the show had a massive decline in minutes watched in its second season compared to its first season. Data tracking firm Nielsen reported in 2022 that the two-episode premiere raked in 1.253 billion minutes watched.
With the Season 2 three-episode premiere it only brought in 1.015 billion minutes watched.
If you do a simple calculation where you divide the total minutes watched by the total run time, it gives you 9.4 million for the first season and 4.9 million views for the second season. That’s a decline of 47%.
That trend continued with the season finales as well. As NowItsKnown on X reports, the week the Season 2 finale aired saw the show’s total minutes only bring in about half of the week when the Season 1 finale aired.
The Season 1 finale brought in 1.137 billion minutes watched while the Season 2 finale only did 527 million minutes watched. That’s a decline of 53.6%.
On top of the brand damage that Rings of Power has done to The Lord of the Rings, The War of the Rohirrim has been piling on itself.
The film has embraced a feminist agenda by making the unnamed daughter of Helm Hammerhand the protagonist rather than Helm Hammerhand, who is the main protagonist in Tolkien’s short story that is found in the Appendix of The Lord of the Rings novels.
An internal marketing document that was obtained by YouTuber Arch and subsequently copyright claimed by Warner Bros. revealed that the whole movie is a bait and switch.
The document detailed that it wants to entice viewers into the film by reinforcing “connections between the world that LOTR fans know and love with this new film – familiar characters (Helm, Eowyn, stunt casting), beautiful settings; Tolkien easter eggs and a continued tradition of quality filmmaking at its finest.”
Producer Philippa Boyens also attempted to justify making the unnamed daughter of Hammerhand the main protagonist in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “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?”
There is also a report that Hera “communes with the Great Eagles" and that she calls “on the power of a seemingly long-lost tribe of female warriors” to drive out the Dunlendings from Rohan.
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