A multibillion-dollar franchise doesn’t always mean that the actors are getting multimillion-dollar paychecks.

Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings have had an immeasurable impact on the film industry and popular culture. The trilogy set new standards for special effects, music and visuals, and the landscapes of New Zealand became Middle-earth for several generations of viewers.

Fantasy genre became popular largely thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies: producers at major film studios saw the potential and began to develop it step by step. Without this huge success, there would be no Game of Thrones, The Witcher, or The Wheel of Time.

LoTR Has a Perfect Cast

Jackson did a great job of finding the perfect actors for the roles. We still associate Frodo with Elijah Wood, Theoden with Bernard Hill and Galadriel with Cate Blanchett (sorry, The Rings of Power ). It seems as if they were destined to play these characters, and it is impossible to imagine other people in their place.

Some of the stories from the filming have become legendary. Sean Bean would get up early in the morning and walk to the mountains because he hated helicopters. Viggo Mortensen did his own stunts, lost part of a tooth and tried to glue it back, broke a toe, almost drowned, and almost got hit in the face by a flying dagger.

Orlando Bloom Was Paid Only $175,000 For Three Movies

Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom, also had his share of suffering – the actor also did almost all the stunts by himself, and at one point fell off his horse and broke a rib. Do you think all that effort was rewarded with millions of dollars? No, Bloom was only paid $175,000 for all three Lord of the Rings movies because he was a relatively unknown actor at the time.

Such a paycheck seems even more ridiculously low considering the fact that Jackson’s trilogy earned an impressive $3 billion worldwide, but the actor himself does not regret such a low payment and even admitted that he would repeat such an experience for any money.

At the same time, because of the short shooting period, the team had to work day and night – the entire process of creating all three films took place simultaneously in 1999-2000, for 438 days.

It was a test for the entire crew: props and decorators, stunt doubles and actors, the director, his assistants and cameramen – everyone gave their all to create a masterpiece that would eventually go down in cinematic history.