“The Hobbit,” and a solid $300 million domestic box office, are becoming a habit for Warner Bros.
“The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” the 90-year-old Hollywood studio’s latest release in its “Lord of the Rings”/“Hobbit” franchise, won the box-office beauty contest for the third straight weekend, racking up a total of $190.3 million in ticket sales since its Dec. 13 opening — and helping Warner Bros. capture the top spot among all Hollywood studios.
The Time Warner unit sold $1.8 billion in tickets to its movies, giving it a 17 percent market share — the fourth time in the past six years it’s finished first among its peers.
The other two years it finished second.
The “LOTR”/“Hobbit” franchise has the highest per-film box office of any at the Kevin Tsujihara-led studio.
The success of the fifth “LOTR/Hobbit” installment leaves the franchise with an average box-office gross of $306 million, according to The-Numbers.com. That’s better than even the $299 million put up by “Harry Potter.”
Other movies that did well for Warner this year were “Gravity” and “Man of Steel,” but the “Lord of the Rings” franchise is helping it keep the cash registers ringing.
“The Hobbit/LOTR franchise seems to be a perpetual profit center and still captures huge worldwide audience and this is evidenced by its three-week run at the top of the worldwide box office,” Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian told The Post.
The series got its start back in 2001 and is now the seventh-highest grossing franchise, based on average box office per film, according to The-Numbers.
Paramount/DreamWorks’ “Transformers” leads the list with an average box office of $358 million.
“One important thing that is constantly missed is how valuable these movies are on TV,” said movie expert Robert Marich, author of “Marketing to Moviegoers.”
“Theatrical is just one out of every five dollars earned by hit movies,” Marich said. “They will forever be earning money on TV. Once you have five, you can have a franchise night on TBS.”
Marich also notes that the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies have been consistently visually stunning. “The Hobbit” trilogy had a production cost of $250 million per picture.
Like “Lord of the Rings,” those movies were filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson, dubbed “Lord of the Ringing Tills” there.
Tsujihara is hoping to keep milking another magical franchise, from J.K. Rowling. There are plans to wring some extra juice from “Harry Potter” by having Rowling agree to release “Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
The movie boss told investors that the Potter spinoff wouldn’t just be a film series but a video game and a theme-park attraction.
“[To] keep these franchises alive, you have to use media tools, such as digital apps, to foster their longevity,” Marich said.