Elijah Wood reveals ‘Lord of the Rings’ salaries were surprisingly low

nypost.com:

Elijah Wood recently revealed that the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which made a huge profit from 2001 to 2003, did not end up in a big pay day for the cast.“Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life,” Wood, 44, explained to Business Insider at the 2025 Texas Film Awards on Wednesday.Wood, who played Frodo Baggins, said that the film’s director Peter Jackson and production company New Line Cinema took “a real gamble” adapting J.R.R.

Tolkien’s novel in 1999. One of the sacrifices that came along was that the cast, which included Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom and Cate Blanchett, would not be granted “massive salaries.” A second term was to shoot all three films back to back.That way, there was no time for the stars to renegotiate their contracts — despite the first project garnering massive success.Between “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” the franchise brought in $2.9 billion worldwide, making it one of the highest-earning film franchises in movie history.“The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives forever,” Wood added, defending his low paycheck as “understandable.”He added: “It doesn’t matter.”In August, while on “Watch What Happens Live,” host Andy Cohen asked Blanchett, 55, who played the elf Galadriel, if “Lord of the Rings” was her biggest payday. “Are you kidding me?” the actress replied. “No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.”“I wanted to work with the guy who made ‘BrainDead,'” Blanchett explained, referring to Jackson. “I mean, I basically got free sandwiches,.