Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood have come forward to say there was no rivalry between the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movies, despite reports saying the productions of the two blockbuster giants were contentious to some degree.
In Empire Magazine’s 20th anniversary interview with Radcliffe and Wood, both stars said that–at least from their perspective–there was no beef.
Wood said, “Certainly from our standpoint, no. It was just admiration of another significant saga that was being made concurrently by incredible filmmakers with an amazing cast.”
Radcliffe agreed. He said, “Yeah, very much the same. That’s why the rivalry stuff, when it came up in the press, really annoyed me, because I was like, ‘We don’t feel this.’ It always seemed very ridiculous.”
The two franchises both came from the film studio Warner Bros., and the movies released around the same time. The first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films debuted in Holiday 2001, with their sequels following in the years after. Both turned out to be behemoths of the box office, and the franchises remain popular and lucrative to this day with additional spin-offs and extensions of the series into other media.
Amazon, for example, is making a big-budget Lord of the Rings TV show, while a Harry Potter live-action TV series may be headed to HBO Max.
Go to Empire’s website to order the April 2021 issue.
