(Credit: Cole Kan/Amazon/Warner Brothers/The Tolkien Estate/Embracer Group)
The Lord of the Rings is sacred in our household. My wife and I watch all three extended editions every year. For a hot second, before kids, we watched twice a year. We also have several framed LOTR maps, a five-book set of Tolkien's work, Lord of the Rings Monopoly, and a little statue of the Argonath on the mantle. If there's anyone who knows how to watch LOTR, it's me.
Peter Jackson's epic trilogy is now 20 years old, but these films have stood the test of time because of the care and dedication that went into making them. In comparison to today's media landscape of cultural fracking, where art and entertainment is mined for intellectual property development and corporate control, the Lord of the Rings movies come from a clear creative vision separate from its masters. You can see how hollow much of Disney's Marvel and Star Wars output is in comparison, despite the resources, technology, and studio work needed to bring them all to life.
However, Tolkien's work has not escaped the arms race of today's entertainment industrial complex. Warner Bros. became too tempted by the power of the franchise, and forced Jackson to adapt The Hobbit into a (misguided) prequel trilogy. And thanks to some utterly confusing IP rights issues, Amazon was able to produce one of the most expensive TV shows ever created on Amazon Prime Video. I won't say everything connected to Middle-earth is good—some of it is quite bad—but if you love the mythology (not lore) and want to spend more time in that world, you might find it worth watching.
Release Order
(Credit: Middle)We have an old DVD player just for watching The Lord of the Rings. For years, that was the only way we had to watch the movies. Thanks to video streaming, we've been able to simplify our setup and watch on HBO Max. I'm no media purist, but I'm convinced that the HD stream on a 4K TV makes these 20-year-old movies look worse, so I'm holding onto the physical media.
If you're interested in watching all the media based on Tolkien's work, I recommend starting with Jackson's films and going in release order. This way, you get to understand what's so incredible about the world before seeing the more disappointing output that follows. In my opinion, having intimate knowledge of The Lord of the Rings has helped me appreciate some of the better parts of The Hobbit, War of the Rohirrim, and even Rings of Power. If you plan to watch in release order, your journey would look like this:
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Theatrical and Extended
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Theatrical and Extended
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - Theatrical and Extended
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Theatrical (Extended isn't available to stream)
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Theatrical and Extended
- The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies - Theatrical and Extended
- The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
While The Hobbit book was released first, Warner Bros. started with the Lord of the Rings movies. By watching in release order, you see Frodo's journey to destroy the One Ring first, followed by The Hobbit films as a prequel series. They kind of went out of their way to add all sorts of characters and storylines that connected it to the original films, which isn't really a good thing, but if you started here you'd probably be very confused!
You could then watch the War of the Rohirrim, an anime film set before the events of Jackson's output that tells the story of a character mentioned in The Two Towers. Finally, you'd watch Amazon's The Rings of Power TV series, which follows an ensemble cast through the forging of the One Ring, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings.
Chronological Order
Now for the real sickos—chronological order. If you're a seasoned veteran of the franchise and willing to change things up, you could watch the series in the order in which they take place. That would mean you'd start with the forging of the One Ring, and Sauron's rise to power in Amazon's television show before moving to the anime spinoff set in the kingdom of Rohan. From there, you would then just watch Bilbo's finding of the ring in The Hobbit films and then Frodo's quest to destroy it in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
- The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
This sounds fun on paper, but the continuity is so spread out over thousands of years that it doesn't feel like you'd get much of a different read on the series in the same way you might by changing up the watch order of the Star Wars films.
Other Related Films
While this is the extent of the "official" continuity, there are still a few more movies to watch. You see, people have been trying to adapt Tolkein's work well before Peter Jackson conceived his version of the story. Several animated adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have been released, including a 1967 short, 1977 TV special, and two theatrical releases from two separate creative teams.
- The Hobbit (1967)
- The Hobbit (1977)
- The Lord of the Rings (1978) - Rent/Buy and Internet Archive
- The Return of the King (1980) - Internet Archive
What I Actually Recommend Watching
(Credit: Middle-Earth Enterprises)As much as I love Tolkien's Middle-earth, there's very little material that I would recommend for the uninitiated. I liked the first The Hobbit film, but the quality falls off considerably after that—likely because there isn't all that much material to adapt into three movies. The War of the Rohirrim is fine, but the idea of a Lord of the Rings anime, in theaters, likely had people expecting something closer to a Studio Ghibli movie.
And as for The Rings of Power, the less said about that show the better. It does a good job of recapturing the vibe of Jackson's movies at times, I'll say that, but it's also embarrassing to watch at times and devolves into cliche franchise slop far too often.
Watch Jackson's LOTR trilogy, because they really are masterpieces the likes of which we may never see again. It's not just the story and the action that I find appealing, it's also just the craftsmanship on display. You can feel how grand of a production it was to make, and that adds to the experience for me. I also highly recommend the extended editions, since so much is fleshed out with the extra runtime. Other than that, I recommend checking out Ralph Bakshi's 1978 The Lord of the Rings, if you can find it, due to how influential it is on Jackson's work.