Fun Facts: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King
• Peter Jackson is arachnophobic and based the Shelob design on the types of spiders he feared the most.
• A normal major motion picture averages about 200 effects shots. This film had 1488.
• Andy Serkis and Elijah Wood were given prop rings used in the movie by director Peter Jackson. They each thought they got the only one.
• The movie made a 1408% profit for New Line Studios on their initial outlay.
• Viggo Mortensen estimates that, during the course of filming the entire trilogy and including all takes, he "killed" every stuntman on the production at least fifty times.
• 100,000 people lined the streets of Wellington for the world premiere. That's roughly a quarter of the city's population.
• Broke the international box office record for an opening weekend, bringing in nearly $250 million.
• The only film to win more than 10 Academy Awards without receiving a single acting nomination.
• This is the second movie featuring Bernard Hill that earned eleven Academy Awards. The first was Titanic (1997).
