The Lord of the Rings is a novel published on 29 July 1954, a film trilogy that took $2.991 billion, a score that won three Academy Awards, a run of video games spanning twenty years, and the most expensive television series ever commissioned. Warner Bros. started shooting another Middle-earth film in Wellington this month. Prime Video puts the next season of its show out on 11 November.
So when a ranking asks whether The Lord of the Rings is any good, the honest answer is: at what?
Against novels it is a founding text. Against films it is a clean sweep. Against television it is the most expensive bet anyone has ever placed. Same name, twelve different questions.
The list where Tolkien gets two entries
Sixteen individual fantasy novels, and two of them are Tolkien's.
The Fellowship of the Ring went on sale on 29 July 1954 in a first printing of 3,000 copies. The Lord of the Rings has since sold more than 150 million, which puts it among the best-selling books ever written in any genre.
The Hobbit is on the same ballot, seventeen years older and written for children.
The company is the modern canon: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, A Game of Thrones, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Name of the Wind. Three of those four were published after 1990, into a market Tolkien's book had spent four decades building.
One word in the question changes the whole field
This ranking asks for the best completed fantasy series, and that adjective does a lot of work.
The Lord of the Rings qualifies on a technicality Tolkien earned the hard way: he spent twelve years writing it, and the three volumes appeared across 1954 and 1955. A Song of Ice and Fire is not on the list, because it cannot be.
The Chronicles of Narnia is, and the pairing is not an accident. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were both Inklings, the Oxford group that met to read unfinished manuscripts aloud at each other through the 1930s and 1940s.
Seventeen series, and the argument runs through Discworld, Mistborn, Earthsea and the Wheel of Time — which its own author did not live to finish.
The only fantasy film the Academy has ever picked
Eighteen Best Picture winners, and one of them is a film about a wizard, a ring and some hobbits.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won eleven Academy Awards from eleven nominations on 29 February 2004 — the only clean sweep of that size in Oscar history, and still the only time the Academy has given Best Picture to a fantasy film.
Eleven ties the all-time record held by Ben-Hur and Titanic, and Titanic is on this same ballot.
There is a hole in the record worth knowing. Across the whole trilogy the Academy handed out exactly one acting nomination — Ian McKellen, supporting actor, for the first film in 2002 — and he lost to Jim Broadbent. Against The Godfather, Casablanca, Schindler's List and Parasite, that is the counter-argument someone will reach for.
A director's whole career, four-sixths of it one story
Peter Jackson's filmography is on this ballot, and Middle-earth takes four of the six slots.
Heavenly Creatures is the film that got him the job. A 1994 drama about a real double murder in Christchurch, it earned Jackson and Fran Walsh an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and gave Kate Winslet her screen debut. Winslet is now in the cast of the Middle-earth film Jackson is producing.
King Kong followed the trilogy in 2005, and it is the only other blockbuster on the list.
What this ranking really measures is how thoroughly one book swallowed a career.
Nine screen versions, and three of them are cartoons
Ask which Middle-earth film is best and the ballot turns out to hold nine, not six.
Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord of the Rings came out in 1978, rotoscoped over live-action footage, and it covers rather less than half the book before stopping. It was never finished; the sequel was cancelled.
Rankin/Bass made a televised Return of the King in 1980 to close the gap, having already animated The Hobbit in 1977.
Jackson's six arrived between 2001 and 2014, and the three extended editions of the trilogy run to roughly eleven and a half hours. A tenth version is on the way: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by and starring Andy Serkis, began principal photography in Wellington in July 2026 for a release on 17 December 2027.
The composer who also scored Hannibal Lecter
Howard Shore wrote all six Middle-earth scores, and three Academy Awards came out of them — two for The Return of the King alone, for original score and for the song Into the West.
Thirteen of his scores are on this ballot, and the rest of the field is a different man entirely.
The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Departed, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch: Shore spent decades as the sound of psychological dread, much of it working with David Cronenberg, before he wrote a note of Middle-earth.
Three of the thirteen options are the trilogy. That concentration is the case for Middle-earth here, and it is also the case against it.
Eleven games, and the best-liked one made its story up
Eleven Middle-earth games are on this ballot, spanning more than twenty years.
Shadow of Mordor arrived in 2014 with the Nemesis System, which remembered every orc that killed you and promoted it. Its plot appears nowhere in Tolkien.
LEGO The Lord of the Rings went the other way in 2012, cutting the films into bricks and using the original recorded dialogue.
The rest is a museum of how games used to be made: EA's tie-ins to The Two Towers and The Return of the King, the 2003 Hobbit platformer, and The Lord of the Rings Online, which launched in 2007 and is still running.
The part Viggo Mortensen nearly didn't play
Aragorn is one of eleven roles on this ballot, and Mortensen came to it late.
Stuart Townsend had been cast and had already started filming when Jackson decided he needed an older Aragorn. Mortensen flew to New Zealand and took over a production that was already running.
The rest of the list is the career that followed: Tony Lip in Green Book, which won Best Picture in 2019, Nikolai in Eastern Promises, and Ben in Captain Fantastic. Mortensen has three acting Oscar nominations and no win.
Middle-earth made him famous. This is the ranking where the reader has to decide whether famous is the same thing as best.
The list where Middle-earth is a line item
Cate Blanchett played Galadriel in all three films and in the Hobbit trilogy after that. On a ballot of her fifteen best films, it is one entry among fourteen others.
Blanchett has two acting Academy Awards, and neither is for Middle-earth: supporting actress for The Aviator in 2005, and best actress for Blue Jasmine in 2014.
TÁR, Carol, Elizabeth, Notes on a Scandal and The Talented Mr. Ripley are all here too.
Galadriel has a handful of scenes across a nine-hour trilogy. This is the ranking where The Lord of the Rings is someone else's supporting credit.
On television the name buys nothing
The Rings of Power is Amazon's Second-Age prequel, and season one cost a reported $715 million — an industry record, with total spend on the five-season plan projected near $1 billion.
It is on a list of sixteen fantasy shows with Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Avatar: The Last Airbender, none of which had anything like that budget.
Money is the one advantage that does not transfer. Two seasons in, the show is still arguing its case.
Season three lands on Prime Video on 11 November 2026, with four episodes at once and the last four across the two Wednesdays after.
$715 million against a one-woman comedy
Sixteen Prime Video originals, and the gap between the biggest and smallest budget on the list is not close.
The Rings of Power is the most expensive television production ever commissioned. Its second season drew roughly 3 billion minutes watched in its first twelve weeks, against nearly 8 billion for the first — a drop of about 60%.
Fleabag ran for twelve episodes total, was adapted from a one-woman stage show, and cost a rounding error by comparison.
The Boys, Fallout, Reacher and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are on the same ballot. This is the ranking where Middle-earth's biggest number is the one working against it.
The characters Tolkien's readers argue about most
Fifteen Rings of Power characters, and the two most interesting ones are the two least expected.
Tom Bombadil is the oldest running argument in Tolkien fandom. He has a long stretch of The Fellowship of the Ring to himself, Jackson cut him entirely, and he finally reached the screen in season two — jovial, unbothered by the One Ring, and impossible to explain.
Adar was invented for the show. An elf tortured into something else, leading the orcs as their father, he has no source text at all.
Galadriel, Sauron, Elrond and Celebrimbor fill out the ballot, and all of them return on 11 November. Tolkien opened his second-edition foreword with a warning nobody has ever obeyed: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations."
Twelve questions, twelve different books
Against novels The Lord of the Rings is a founding text. Against films it is a record-setting sweep. Against television it is the most expensive experiment anyone has run, and it is being judged on the same shelf as a comedy that cost nothing.
The story never changed. The category did, twelve times. That is the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things two at a time.
Got a book, a film or a franchise that turns up everywhere? Build a ranking and find out where it lands.
More rankings, more angles
- Where Does Harry Potter Actually Rank? — the other fantasy series, measured every way
- Star Wars: 16 Lists, 16 Different Answers — another franchise that will not sit still
- How Rankings Are Scored: The 1000-Point System — what turns votes into an order