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'The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King' Is 15 Years Old Today

'The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King' Is 15 Years Old Today

Your daily reminder that your life is slipping away from you...

Tom Wood

Tom Wood

As if it were needed, another potent and timely reminder that you cannot escape the unstoppable march of time occurs today.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Yup, it was a whole decade and a half ago that we finally reached the epic denouement of one of the greatest cinematic stories ever told. Frodo and co finally made it to Mordor and destroyed the Ring of Power, vanquishing the Dark Lord Sauron in the process.

For those of you crying 'spoilers' - come on, you've had 15 years to watch it. The book has been out for 62 years, as well. You've no excuse not to have seen or read it. If you still haven't there's even a TV show coming soon.

To be fair, given how popular it was when it was released at the cinemas all the way back in 2003, there can't be a whole load of people out there who haven't seen it.

It instantly became one of the largest box office success stories in the history of cinema. It was the highest grossing film of 2003 and the second highest grossing film of the whole of the 2000s decade.

New Line Cinema

In case you're wondering, Avatar is the only film from that ten-year period that took more. Rubbish, as well, wasn't it?

In total, it took in over $1bn, becoming only the second film ever to do that.

The critics were pretty keen on it, too.

It was nominated for 11 awards at the 76th Academy Awards in 2004. It only went and won every single bloody one of those awards. That's pretty damn good going, by anyone's standards.

In fact, the only films that can keep up with that are Titanic and Ben Hur.

via GIPHY

The good news is, you can go and catch up with all of your old chums from Middle Earth right now, if you so desire. The whole epic trilogy is now available on Netflix - in the UK at least - so you can chill out with Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli whilst you wait for Christmas to arrive.

In fact, watching the whole trilogy back to back would basically take you the whole way up to Christmas. That's not even the extended versions, either.

In case you're wondering, watching all of them would take 11 hours and 24 minutes. You could do that all in one sitting, right? Order a Domino's and get an empty bottle or something?

Featured Image Credit: New Line Cinema

Topics: Film, Movies, TV and Film, US Entertainment, Hollywood