When Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring debuted on December 10, 2001, it was considered a likely boondoggle. Hollywood hadn’t launched a truly successful fantasy film franchise since the first Star Wars trilogy in the 1970s. If it was going to create one now, the savvy take was that the Harry Potter movies were a better bet, with a more active fan base and a simpler, more movie-friendly plot structure than that boasted by JRR Tolkien’s labyrinthine Lord of the Rings trilogy. What’s more, Peter Jackson’s last major film, 1996’s The Frighteners, was a flop. Jackson, Variety wrote at the time, with slight incredulity, “must have convinced someone that he would do it right.”

Yet The Fellowship of the Ring was a hit. It opened at $47 million domestically, the top of the box office by a record-breaking margin, and would go on to gross $889 million worldwide. It was nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture. “By the end,” declared the Wall Street Journal in a rave review opening weekend, “you know you’ve been visiting a world truly governed by magic.”

Fellowship and its sequels became a template for what Hollywood success would look like over the next two decades. It showed executives that people were eager to........

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