7 Movies Way Better Than They Had Any Right To Be

Before it was done, everyone would have said it was impossible. How could you bring J. R. R. Tolkien's expansive, high-fantasy world of Middle Earth to the big screen, and please both hardcore fans and your average movie goer off the street?

Director Peter Jackson originally suffered enormous pressure from Miramax to condense the entire story down into one film, before managing to secure a deal for the full trilogy with New Line. They also shot all three films simultaneously and had to replace the actor for Aragorn mere weeks before filming began.

The score, the acting, the adaptation from the source material, the cinematography, the action, the costume design, the direction, the visual effects, the sound design; all of it had to work for such an ambitious film series to pop. Well, pop it did. The lightning in a bottle that the Lord of the Rings managed to capture couldn’t even be replicated by Jackson in the more recent Hobbit trilogy.

Being created in a time when CGI was still tip-toeing around in the experimental phase, the films still visually hold up today as the ultimate realisation of a fantasy tale on the big screen.