Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter influence a decade of blockbusters
This is the final entry in a handful of essays that will be dealing with the various trends that were kicked off during the 2001 calendar year, and how they still resonate today.
Yesterday (the 19th) marked the tenth anniversary of the US theatrical release of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. It was just over a month after the US theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which had debuted with a record-breaking $92 million opening weekend. Debuting with a December-record $72 million five-day haul, The Fellowship of the Ring parlayed superb reviews and splendid word of mouth to break a number of Christmas and New Year’s season records and show off some of the best legs this side of Titanic and The Sixth Sense. These two films, which closed out the year, would directly or indirectly pave the way for the next full decade of would-be blockbuster filmmaking. At last, we had
reached a point where basically anything was possibly onscreen if you had enough money and (ideally) enough talent. The culmination of every trend discussed in the prior essays (the gutting of the R-rating, the explosion in opening weekend box office potential, the emergence of overseas box office dominance, the mainstreaming of ‘family entertainment’ etc) was personified in the massive success of these two big-budget fantasy pictures. Whether based on a novel, a comic book, or a theme park ride, big-budget fantasy spectaculars were about to become the dominant tentpole of choice.
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