{"id":976,"date":"2021-09-28T15:37:16","date_gmt":"2021-09-28T15:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/?p=976"},"modified":"2022-10-19T16:55:06","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T16:55:06","slug":"blog-economic-impact-of-lotr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/blog\/economic-impact-of-lotr\/","title":{"rendered":"The Economic Impact of LOTR"},"content":{"rendered":"[video_player video_media_title_id='0767fee6-ded1-4e04-9e8a-c49f99a5dc19']\r\n\r\n\r\n
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It's hard to believe that it's been 75 years since J.R.R. Tolkien first imagined the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Tolkien said he originally wrote The Hobbit<\/em>, with its adventures of halflings and goblins and elves, to amuse his children. He ended up writing a story that would last for generations, though, and the three-volume novel that followed \u2014 The Lord of the Rings<\/em> \u2014 cemented his place in literary history. With more than 150 million copies sold, the trilogy is one of the best-selling novels ever, and today it stands as one of the highest-grossing franchises of all time.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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The economic impact of Tolkien's masterpiece is difficult to fathom, but the brand is obviously a goldmine. Today's readers are as enraptured with the against-all-odds heroics of the hobbits as they were over 50 years ago. And New Zealand, home to the locations from Peter Jackson's film adaptations of Lord of the Rings<\/em>, has seen an explosion in tourism. (Jackson's three movies grossed almost $2 billion worldwide<\/a>.) Additionally, businesses from movie theaters and toy and game manufacturers owe Tolkien a debt of gratitude.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Check out the latest video from OnlineMBA.com to see the breakdown of the economic impact of this fantasy epic. With the arrival of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em> in movie theaters, the franchise doesn't look to be slowing down any time soon.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Video Transcript<\/h2>\r\n

Written from 1937-1949, The Lord of the Rings has sold over 150 million copies, been turned into wildly successful movies, and is the 4th best-selling novel of all time. The economic impact of this series can be broken out into three general areas.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

  1. Books: Current prices vary from $20 for a paperback to $50 and beyond for special sets of hardbacks. At a modest average of about $15 - it's feasible to assume the books have made $2.25 billion, not counting the sales of used books.<\/li>
  2. Movies: Lord of the Rings sits comfortably as the 6th highest grossing movie franchise of all time - pulling in just under 4 billion dollars. On a per film basis, The Return of the King actually made the second most money of a franchise film, beating out Harry Potter and only being beaten by Star Wars. It made $1.1 billion, not including the $200 million in advance taxation credits New Zealand offered to lure director Peter Jackson away from Australia for filming.<\/li>
  3. Tourism: From 2000 to 2006, New Zealand watched their tourism numbers jump from 1.7 to 2.4 million, a 40% increase, and many people credit the increase to Lord of the Rings tourism.<\/li><\/ol>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

    But let's not forget the Hobbit: New Zealand offered another $25 million in tax breaks to Warner Brothers to secure the filming location of these films.# In comparison to the Star Wars prequel series, which brought in $1.4 billion - about half the income of the original series - if the Hobbit trilogy does well, it could mean another $2 billion dollars for the Lord of the Rings franchise. That's roughly the GDP of Greenland.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[video_player video_media_title_id=’0767fee6-ded1-4e04-9e8a-c49f99a5dc19′] It’s hard to believe that it’s been 75 years since J.R.R. Tolkien first imagined the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Tolkien said he originally wrote , with its adventures of…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12389,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"mba-rankings":[],"resources":[],"careers":[],"schools":[],"blog":[9],"specializations":[],"mba-by-state":[],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","blog-all"],"acf":[],"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"mba-rankings","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mba-rankings?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"resources","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resources?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"careers","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/careers?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"schools","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/schools?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"specializations","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/specializations?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"mba-by-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onlinemba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mba-by-state?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}