The Return of the King

Cinema foyer lighting, when coupled with lifesize cutouts and tacky, super-sized posters makes for quite an unusual scene. I took this photograph while queuing for The Return of the King, which — although quite a wait — didn’t last for nearly as long as the feature presentation. According to MovieWeb, the film has grossed nearly USD $295 million in the two weeks since its opening. Remarkable. Perhaps even more amazing is the ability of the film to capture the attention of a mainstream audience for nearly 3.5 hours. This is testament to the depth and timelessness of Tolkien’s universe and Peter Jackson’s courageous (if butchered) adaption.

The evening was not without incident: there was no sound for the opening scene, the trailers wobbled dizzyingly, and in the climactic scene at Mt Doom the power went out entirely due to what ushers described as a ‘complete grid blackout’ and emergency generator failure. The backup generator came online eventually, but the lack of redundancy is disappointing. I would have requested a refund, had the queue for doing so not been almost as long as the queue for tickets…