The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim rides onto Max on February 28

William Hughes

Feb. 21, 2025, 3:56 p.m.

The first Middle-earth-based movie to hit theaters in roughly a decade came out late last year, albeit not necessarily in a way so’s ya’d notice: The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim—whose origins may have had a bit less to do with someone really wanting to tell one of the side stories culled from J.R.R. Tolkien’s myriad appendices, and more with efforts to fight over the franchise’s film rights—came and went from theaters with a quickness. (It failed to make back even its pretty modest $30 million budget, and started getting yanked from theaters just two weeks after release.) Still, great news today for anyone who saw the trailer for the movie, thought “That looks exactly neat enough to watch in a scenario where it costs me no money and I can do it from my couch,” and then promptly forgot about it, because the film has now set its streaming debut date: February 28 on Max, ahead of airing on HBO on March 1.

In his review of the film, The A.V. Club‘s own Matt Schimkowitz highlighted the ways the film might make for a better casual perusal than the cornerstone of a trip out to the theater, highlighting how genuinely cool it can look in motion. (Courtesy of the team surrounding director Kenji Kamiyama, best known for his work on the Ghost In The Shell franchise.) But its “rote mythmaking” undercuts some of that visual grandeur, rendering the film “more fan fiction than adaptation, fleshing out the heretofore unwritten legends of Tolkien’s peripheral and unnamed characters and reducing the myths that colored the edges of Tolkien’s world into recognizable story beats of revenge, unrequited love, and patriarchal control.” All of which sounds like it’ll go down a lot easier in the context of settling an “Eh, what do you want to watch tonight?” argument, honestly, even if the film’s not likely to end up getting included in any LOTR marathons you’ve got looming on the horizon.