Lord of the Rings
KEEP OUR PROMISES
When we launched this website in December 2003, we made a promise that we would eventually put up here an account of what we were learning from all your responses to our questionnaires. This is the start of our keeping that promise. In order to do that in
a way that means anything, we will also need to tell you some more about why we have been doing this research, and how we are doing it. We will also in due course tell you a bit more about us the research teams around the world who are working on this project.
For now, though, some of the raw statistics because that\\\'s what we have been dealing with recently.
Nearly 25,000 of you across the world filled in our questionnaires. Many thanks to every single one of you who took the time to do this - we wanted all the different views we could get, and we certainly got them! 22,000 of you did it through this website. The remainder were ones which we gathered on an identical paper version, and input to the web ourselves. Of course we would always have liked to have more than that. But the most important thing for us as researchers is that this gave us more than enough to allow us to go on to do some complex and sophisticated investigations of all your responses. This is what we will be doing in the next few months. We will be looking for patterns, groupings, connections and therefore, also, for differences, comparisons, disagreements. All this will be part of our exploring how a story, and a film, like The Lord of the Rings matters to different people.
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Here are some of the key elements of the Profile we drew up of your responses (remember, these simple tabulated answers are only possible for the questions which were multiple-choice in form we are doing other kinds of analysis of the other questions):
We asked you - What did you think of the film? Your answers showed very high levels of enjoyment of the film:
Extremely enjoyable
17449
70.8%
Very enjoyable
5148
20.9%
Reasonably enjoyable
1578
6.4%
Hardly enjoyable
262
1.1%
Not enjoyable at all
201
0.8%
No answer
109
Of course, we cannot say that this level of enjoyment is true of everyone who went to see the film. In fact, that is very unlikely, since people who are enthusiastic are more likely to fill in a questionnaire about the film. So, to us, the questions that immediately arise are: what kinds of people are they who most enjoy the film? What do they see in the film that others who dont enjoy it as much, or at all, dont see - and vice versa?
We also asked you - How important was it to see the film?
Extremely important
14732
59.7%
Very important
5987
24.2%
Reasonably important
3043
12.3%
Hardly important
639
2.6%
Not important at all
284
1.2%
No answer
62
What is interesting to us is that these dont tidily match each other - for some people enjoyment was greater than importance, and this is the kind of discrepancy which gets any researcher\\\'s nose twitching - who are these people? How did they enjoy the film? But of course, first we have to find out if it is indeed always the same people who most enjoy the film and for whom it was most important to see it - we cannot make that assumption.
We asked you - What kind of story is The Lord of the Rings for you? Please choose up to three.
Allegory
2586
3.8%
Epic
13044
19.2%
Fairytale
2808
4.1%
Fantasy
9885
14.5%
Game-world
531
0.7%
Good vs evil
10734
15.8%
Myth/legend
8897
13.1%
Quest
8288
12.2%
SFX film
5572
8.2%
Spiritual journey
1877
2.8%
Threatened homeland
1688
2.5%
War story
2174
3.2%
This was a very important question for us, and it is turning out to be really helpful for exploring a lot of topics. For example, we can ask ourselves questions like the following:
a) What are the commonest combinations among these? Why does it appear to be the case that the most common combinations are different in different parts of the world?
b) Why is it that in the UK the choice of Spiritual Journey is chosen more by older females than in the rest of the world?
c) It is perhaps not surprising that Fairytale associates with quite low levels of enjoyment of the film - but then why does SFX film associate with very high levels?
d) The term \\\"epic\\\" is clearly the most commonly chosen. But does it mean the same among different groups (by country, by age group, by occupation?
e) Is there any difference between people who chose only one of the above, and those who chose three?
These are just a very few of the questions we are now asking, by looking more closely at the answers to this question, and then at the links between this one, and some of the others. [Of course, we have not forgotten that some of you did not want to choose any of our twelve you nominated your own. We are looking separately at these.]
We asked you - What was the main source of your expectations?
The books
13343
59.6%
The director
326
1.5%
One of the stars
434
1.9%
The first two parts of the film
7334
32.8%
A game associated with the film
150
0.6%
Nothing in particular
803
3.6%
Other answers
2357
These might seem unsurprising, but at the very least they throw doubt on some claims that are commonly made about the importance of publicity machines around films, or the role of reviews, and so on. We will be looking at any possible connections between sources of expectations, how enjoyable the films were, and the kind of story it was felt to be. That\\\'s just for starters.
We wanted to know a few things about you, so we asked you about your sex:
Male
12174 (50.1%)
Female
12108 (49.9%)
These were astonishingly close together - a fact which helps us in a number of ways!
Your age:
Under 16
2486
10.2%
16 - 25
11722
47.9%
26 -35
5938
24.3%
36 - 45
2563
10.4%
46 - 55
1305
5.3%
56 - 65
364
1.5%
Over 65
103
0.4%
It was inevitable we would get so many more younger people - both because more younger people tend to go to the cinema, and because they use the internet more.
How often have you seen Fellowship of the Ring? How often have you seen Two Towers?
Once
3321
Once
3851
More than once
20948
More than once
19882
Not at all
219
Not at all
341
There is something interesting in what some people have called the \\\"re-invention\\\" of the repeat viewing audience. Be assured, we are exploring it through your answers!
We asked you - How many times have you read the books of The Lord of the Rings?
Read all three books once
5195
21.2%
Read all three more than once
11614
47.4%
Read some of the books
1625
6.6%
Still reading for the first time
1603
6.5%
Haven\\\'t read them at all
4469
18.2%
As with all the other tables, we are now looking at how, for different groups of people, knowing about the books in advance has affected their enjoyment of the film - and of course, more complicatedly, what the film means to them.
We also asked you your occupation. The figures for this are complicated to calculate, and we are still working on them.
All this is just the beginning for us of a really long and complicated analysis of the huge array of materials we have gathered. As time goes by, we will post more here. This is just the beginning of keeping our promise.
Martin Barker
Director, International Lord of the Rings Audience Research Project
Tags: Lord of the Rings; Research