Long Range Forecast: LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM Rides into Cinemas This December

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Long Range Forecast — December 13, 2024

Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim | Warner Bros. Pictures

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $10M – $25M

An absolute box office behemoth over the first few years of the aughts, the Lord of the Rings franchise returns to theaters this December with the animated Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, helmed by acclaimed anime director Kenji Kamiyama. Forecasts are incredibly volatile here until pre-sales and marketing data give insight into how appealing War of the Rohirrim could (or could not) be outside the Lord of the Rings faithful. Opening in a crowded holiday season also presents its challenges, as the franchise is not as fresh with modern audiences as it once was.

Rohirrim, like the six previous theatrically released films in the Rings franchise, hits theaters in mid-December; however, grosses on this animated endeavor are expected by our forecasting panel to be well below anything from the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit trilogies.

Between 2001 and 2003, the Lord of the Rings franchise dominated the December box office, with The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King coming out back-to-back-to-back across three consecutive years; each film was either the first- (Return of the King) or second- (Fellowship and Two Towers) highest grossing film of their respective year, and Return of the King cleaned up at the 2024 Oscars in what served as a victory lap for a then-omnipresent cultural phenomena.

Nine years after Return of the King, Warner Bros. and director Peter Jackson brought the world of J.R.R. Tolkien back to theaters with an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit, stretched out across three movies despite the source material clearly not having enough plot to justify a trilogy. (Jackson initially wanted to make two Hobbit films only.) While the Rings movies enjoyed higher domestic grosses with each subsequent entry, the Hobbit movies earned less each time. Though the latter trilogy was by no means a financial disaster for Warner Bros.—particularly worldwide, where it grossed a combined $2.9B—the Hobbit films failed to achieve anything close to the critical acclaim and cultural relevance of the earlier trilogy, which is still a reliable theatrical earner when occasionally re-released in an event cinema capacity by Fathom Events.

In the ten years since the book was closed on the Hobbit trilogy, the extent to which casual Lord of the Rings fans—those who were fans of the movies but never slogged through Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, say—are interested in a new film set in that universe. The matter of general audience interest is an even bigger question mark. Though Amazon MGM Studios is two seasons into the planned five-season run of Amazon Prime’s streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, it remains to be seen whether that series will drive interest in Rohirrim to any significant degree, as the two don’t share a common cast of characters, a time period, or even a medium of production.

The War of the Rohirrim being an animated film makes it difficult to find reliable comps. Other franchises have made the jump from live-action to animation, but they usually do so while keeping the same characters from previous adaptations. (See: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers franchises.) In September of this year, animated prequel Transformers One opened to $24.6M, which is in line with our Rohirrim forecast. But Rohirrim has some hurdles that Transformers One didn’t:

• The aforementioned ten-year gap since the last Lord of the Rings movie; in the last ten years, three Transformers movies have hit theaters
• The majority of the Rohirrim characters being new to the franchise
• A PG-13 rating that reflects ambiguity as to the age range of the intended audience. (Only one PG-13 movie, The Simpsons Movie, is in the top hundred highest-grossing animated films of all time.)
• Transformers One came out in the middle of a quiet September, while Rohirrim will face stiff competition from holdovers Wicked Part 1 and Moana 2, plus later December releases Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King.

Tracking Updates [as of 11/15]