The Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit movies have mostly positive reviews in Rotten Tomatoes, yet the two Lord of the Rings trilogies saw significantly different reception from Rotten Tomatoes critics and audiences. With The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power about to release on Amazon Prime with positive early reactions from critics, audiences are about to go back to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth for the first time since 2014, so how do all of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies compare in Rotten Tomatoes?
SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001 with its sequels, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, each arriving a year after each other, garnering massive praise from critics and audiences and loading up on Academy Awards (particularly The Return of the King). The Hobbit movies arrived a decade later, and while director Guillermo del Toro was going to take the movies in a slightly different direction, those plans were significantly altered when he was replaced by Peter Jackson, who brought the movies more in-line with the continuity of his original trilogy, adding more connective tissue and set-up for the events of The Lord of the Rings.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies all received generally positive reviews, but compared to Jackson's original Lord of the Rings trilogy there's a clear drop in the Rotten Tomatoes scores. Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregator scores represent an amalgamation of subjective opinions, and the way critics score movies changes a bit over time, but there's still some interesting differences between the Lord of the Rings movies' Rotten Tomatoes scores compared to The Hobbit movies.
The Lord of the Rings Movies Score Way Better Than The Hobbit Movies in All Rotten Tomatoes Categories
The best-reviewed movie in Peter Jackson's two Middle Earth trilogies is The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with a Fresh 95 percent score in Rotten Tomatoes, The Return of the King is the second highest with 95 percent, and The Fellowship of the Ring is third highest at 91 percent, with a cumulative average of 93 percent. The Hobbit movies all rank in the bottom three with The Desolation of Smaug coming in fourth at 74 percent, An Unexpected Journey is fifth at 64 percent, and The Battle of the Five Armies is the sixth and lowest rated movie at 59 percent, the franchise's only Rotten score. Altogether, The Hobbit movies average 66 percent, 27 points lower than the Lord of the Rings average.
It's not just Tomatometer critics that prefer Peter Jackson's original Lord of the Rings trilogy to The Hobbit movies, either. Top Critics average 94 percent in Rotten Tomatoes, one point higher than the average from all critics, while The Hobbit movies average just 56 percent, a full ten points lower than the average from all critics. When it comes to audiences, the original trilogy once again comes out on top with a 92 percent average (just one point lower than the score from all critics), while The Hobbit movies averaged 81 percent from audiences, which is a big 15 point jump from the all critic Tomatometer score.
The Hobbit Movies Have (Mostly) Good Rotten Tomatoes Scores, But Lost Top Critics
Even though The Hobbit movies have much lower scores than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they still scored an overall Fresh average score of 66 percent, with only one of the three movies, The Battle of the Five Armies scoring the franchise's only Rotten score at 59 percent, which is just one percent too low to earn a Fresh score, and still represents more than half of critics giving it a positive review. Despite the generally positive reception from all critics, The Hobbit movies see a massive drop-off when it comes to the scores from Rotten Tomatoes' special selection of "Top Critics" with a Rotten 56 percent, brought way down by The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies' 49 percent Top Critic score.
Related: Why Christopher Tolkien Hated Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings Movies
While the Top Critics score isn't inherently more or less important than the score for all critics, differences in scoring trends between the groups can reveal the general perception of certain movies among different types of critics. In the case of the Lord of the Rings franchise, the original trilogy got better scores from Top Critics, while The Hobbit trilogy sees a ten-point drop-off. Top Critics don't always diverge from the combined all critics Tomatometer score, but when they do it's usually when there's a mismatch between the movie's entertainment value and social or artistic merits. So, while critics may praise the spectacle of big-budget blockbusters, Top Critics still enjoy spectacle, but tend to prefer the kind of movies celebrated at the Academy Awards, and that plays out with the scoring of The Hobbit movies. While all three movies received nominations, they were all in technical categories like visual effects and sound editing, while the original Lord of the Rings movies all saw more nominations, including categories like Best Director and Best Picture, and every Lord of the Rings trilogy movie won multiple categories, with The Return of the King famously sweeping all 11 Academy Awards it was nominated for.
Top Critics preferring the original Lord of the Rings trilogy doesn't mean the movies are inherently better (even if all the all critics score and audience score agree), since the scores are still all subjective, although the increased care for the art of cinema over grandiose spectacle seems to highlight the biggest difference between the two franchises. The Hobbit movies are full of their fair share of action and humor and are targeted at a less mature audience in general, as is The Hobbit book, but the much lower budget of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy meant they leaned a lot more on practical effects and traditional filmmaking techniques, cinematography, dialogue. The increased budget for The Hobbit movies also meant more CGI characters, more over-the-top chase scenes, and more over-the-top Legolas, which conveniently tend to be some of the biggest criticisms against The Hobbit movies.
Audiences and Critics (Mostly) Agree on All Lord of the Rings and Hobbit Movies on Rotten Tomatoes
Despite the big drop off in the Top Critics score for The Hobbit movies, there's actually an impressive consistency in review scores from the three categories the aggregator measures: all critics, Top Critics, and audience. This doesn't mean the scores themselves match, obviously, there's some major differences between the two trilogies as already noted, but the way Rotten Tomatoes critics, Top Critics, and audiences rate each movie sees a lot lower variance in scores compared to other franchises.
When it comes to the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, the scores from all critics only have a four-point variance (from a 91 percent low to a 95 percent high), Top Critics have a seven-point variance (from a 91 percent low to a 98 percent high), and audiences have a nine-point variance (from 86 percent low to a 95 percent high). Not only does every category see a fairly low spread of nine points or fewer, but the consistency across each category is impressive. ForThe Hobbit movies, the scores see a bit more of a variance, with all critics seeing a spread of 15 points (from a 59 percent low to a 74 percent high), Top Critics have an 18-point spread (from a 49 percent low to a 67 percent high), and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score only has an 11-point spread from a 74 percent low to an 85 percent high).
While the scores in each category see a wider split between the top score and the bottom score, but the variances are fairly consistent between categories without any wild outlier scores. Other franchises, like MCU, the DCEU, or Star Wars see much wider swings between the high score and low score, but considering those franchises all have more movies than the six movies in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy, it shouldn't be a surprise to see a wider spread. It's not clear exactly what this consistency actually says about the movie or the filmmakers, but it could indicate a strong relationship between the filmmaker's vision and audience expectations. Regardless, Middle Earth movies have an overall positive reception on Rotten Tomatoes, so hopefully Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power can recapture audience love for Tolkien's universe.