10 Strangest Mistakes Kept In Movies
8. Legolas' Changing Eye Colour - The Lord of the Rings
As incredible as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is, even those films aren't perfect. Case in point, there's a most bizarre inconsistency with Legolas' (Orlando Bloom) eyes, which change colour from blue to brown randomly across the three movies.
There's no fanciful in-universe explanation for this. Rather, the brown-eyed Bloom found it extremely uncomfortable to wear Legolas' blue-coloured contact lenses for long periods of time and so had to shoot many scenes without them.
By Jackson's own admission on the Extended Trilogy's DVD commentary, he sometimes forgot to keep track of whether Bloom was wearing the lenses, resulting in Legolas' eye colour changing on a whim. But considering the trilogy's magnificent achievements in VFX ,and Jackson's obviously meticulous approach to basically everything, it's surprising that he didn't fix it in post and have Legolas' eyes tinted blue with CGI.
This is ultimately the approach that Jackson adopted on The Hobbit trilogy, with Bloom's eyes being digitally altered to a striking blue. For all of the Hobbit series' missteps, this was one thing it probably did better than the Rings trilogy.