Sean Astin remembers the bad original marketing for The Lord of the Rings

Given the status of The Lord of the Rings as one of the most beloved movie trilogies of all time, it’s hard to imagine how New Line Cinema could have messed up the original marketing campaign…but it did. Even all these years later, Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) can’t forget how the initial marketing completely “missed the mark.”

And it wasn’t just Astin who thought the original marketing fell flat. The feeling was shared throughout the cast. Astin recalls early promotions evoking the famous tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which has stood the test of time in its own right, but is pretty different from The Lord of the Rings.

“I remember the initial marketing campaign sort of missed the mark, treated it as kind of a Dungeons & Dragons thematic approach and missed the classical feel,” Astin told Deadline in an interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring. “I remember all of us, our hearts were sinking because we’re like, ‘Oh, no, maybe the studio or the marketing folks are expecting something different than what we think we’ve created.”

The Lord of the Rings marketing improved before wide release

I can imagine how, at the time, this must’ve felt like a massive letdown for everyone involved in the production. The Lord of the Rings movies were ridiculously risky, both because of the massive scale and the structure: rather than just adapt the first book and see how it did before committing to a sequel, New Line Cinema decided to put all their eggs in one basket and film the entire trilogy back-to-back-to-back. If Fellowship had flopped, it would’ve been an unmitigated disaster.

However, when the Cannes Film Festival rolled around in 2001, the marketing was drastically improved. “The Cannes Film Festival showed what we knew, that the film was spectacular and we had created something that would stand the test of time,” Astin explained.

"After Cannes, they got it right. The posters of just Elijah with his hands and a huge ring in it, on bus stops and everything else."

Thankfully, Peter Jackson’s trilogy received award after award, basically defining what a successful movie trilogy looks like. Even all these years later it remains relevant, with fancy new enhanced editions always arriving.

And our fascination with Middle-earth is far from over. In fact, more money is being thrown at it than ever before. Soon, we’ll see Amazon Prime’s crazy expensive Lord of the Rings prequel series. In addition, acclaimed director Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell) is developing his own animated Lord of the Rings movie called The War of the Rohirrim.

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