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A YEAR AGO TO THE DAY, I stood, alone, on the banks of the Brandywine River, and raised quiet voice of criticism against The Return of the King. Suspecting that it would win critical praise overdue from The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers--as well as the Oscars those movies deserved--I predicted that down the road Return of the King would be the least loved installment of the series. Love is difficult to measure, but dollars are not. Look, for example, at the box office returns for the trilogy. Fellowship began by earning $315 million in the United States. The Two Towers saw a modest increase to $342 million, which is what sequels are supposed to do. Return of the King saw only a similar increase, to $377 million. Make no mistake, $377 million is a healthy number. Most movies would cry to do such numbers. But with $342 million as a baseline and two years of pent-up expectation, it probably should have done better. Particularly considering Oscar: Traditionally, winning big at the Academy Awards has been thought to add anywhere from $10 million to $50 million to a movie's box office gross. (Last year a group of professors at Colby College analyzed data for Academy Award nominees and winners prior to 1987 and found that the true benefit of a Best Picture win was an average bump of $16 million. As movie inflation has skyrocketed, box-office take has been front-loaded, and the Academy Awards have become
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a more omnipresent event, it is likely that the average boost for a Best Picture winner today is significantly greater.)DVD sales of Return of the King have been more promising. The trilogy's distributor, New Line, declined to release sales figures for the various DVD editions, but the trade magazine DVD Exclusive reports that Fellowship sold 11.7 million copies (it's Extended Edition sold another 4.3 million) and Two Towers sold 10.8 million copies (plus 4.2 million Extended Edition copies). By contrast, Return of the King has sold 12.5 million copies. Good numbers, but not what you would expect for the most heralded edition of the franchise. You may have talked yourself into loving Return of the King when it first came out, but for most people, grubby reality has finally set in. The grubby reality is that Return of the King was a deeply flawed enterprise. It was, by leagues, the weakest of the three movies. The pacing was poor, the timeline condensed. There were plot holes and characters who suddenly became passive. There were dramatic deformities aplenty. And yet there is good news: This week the extended version of Return of the King comes to DVD. The four-disc set is loaded with features and commentaries and, most important, 50 extra minutes of footage which has been woven into the film. This extra footage addresses, I'm happy to say, nearly every defect which I reported on a year ago.
THE FULL EXTENDED EDITION of Return of the King now runs a staggering 250 minutes. Yet, if anything, it moves more briskly than the theatrical release. The new footage is sprinkled in fairly evenly throughout, with large clumps gathering here and there. In the first large-scale addition, we get the confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard. Peter Jackson strays from the text in order to avoid another coda from the book. This deviation is not entirely unwelcome. |
