rings bling bling

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is now the 6th biggest earner of all-time, according to the Internet Movie Database. With US$918,100,000 in grosses worldwide, all pure profit (because the $300M budget was easily recouped by the first movie alone), it is now just a few million dollars behind The Two Towers. Both movies are still leagues behind Titanic, but at least the combined grosses of the three surpass that movie with Leo and Kate. I sure hope Orlando Bloom opted for a percent of profits--well, at least they're all probably going to have big fat hobbitses--er, bonuses.

I contributed a big fat US$6 to that gross, since I watched the movie thrice on the big screen. I think that's the price of just one movie in the US, right? Even less. Oh well. I was just thinking, talking about the hundreds of millions, how big that really is, and how Peter Jackson and his producers have managed to pull off something this big. Of course it's much less than Bill Gates's billion-dollar empire but still. $2.7B is a big chunk of our foreign debt. In fact, checking our office's financial statements, our total worth is only around US$200M. You would only have two Rings movies from that.

The cost of a movie ticket in the malls that I frequent here in Manila is around US$2. That's 0.000000218% of RoTK's total gross. And around 75% of our population can't afford to watch it.