The highest body count in film history goes to “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” with 836 on-screen deaths.
100 Mind-Blowing Lord Facts
The costume designers for The Lord of the Rings worked for two straight years making custom armour. Just one Orc suit had 13,000 rings and took 3 days to make.
A Lord of the Rings actor would rather hike up a whole mountain than ride a helicopter. One of the things that makes Lord of the Rings lore so rich is the immersive environment of the story’s settings. While shooting the films, the cast had to fly to remote locations via helicopter. Sean Bean, who plays Boromir (and Ned Stark in Game of Thrones) was afraid of flight, and would only do it if he had no choice. During the shootings for the Fellowship crossing snowy mountains, he’d climb for two hours every morning to get to the set. He would make the climb already dressed as Boromir.
Shrek originally had a thick Canadian accent. The titular character of the instant classic was voiced by Mike Myers, who spoke in an amped-up version of his Canadian accent. When Myers watched the first rough cut, he loved everything about it, except his voice! He thought that Shrek would be better off with a Scottish accent to counter the English-accented villain, Lord Farquaad – a change that ended up costing about $4 million!
There’s a soviet version of The Lord of the Rings, and it’s downright woeful. Titled Khraniteli (The Keepers) followed the plot of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in JRR Tolkien’s legendary trilogy. It was released straight to TV in 1991, and much like the Soviet Union as a whole, it ended up being a complete and utter catastrophe. While the characters and plot may be recognizable to those who dare to watch Khraniteli, the special effects (if you can call them that!) are so lacking that it ruins the point of producing it in the first place.
J. R. R. Tolkien invented the languages of Middle Earth before he even thought of writing stories in the fictional universe. Tolkien was without a doubt a natural polyglot, learning more than 35 languages throughout his life. When he was a teenager, he invented his first language, which would inspire the 20 or so languages he ultimately created for Middle Earth. Once he began inventing the languages, he realized that he needed people to speak them, and it was only from this point that he thought to write The Lord of the Rings and his other works.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18, during a ghost story competition while staying in Switzerland with writers Percy Shelley (her lover) and Lord Byron.
80% to 90% of all special effects seen in Hollywood movies post-2002 have been created with the help of Linux. Linux was used for Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and many other big franchises.