This warning was given at a New Zealand Studies Association conference in London this weekend with claims the success of the LOTR movies was making New Zealand too expensive for locally financed film projects.

“Whenever offshore films come in, the native film industry becomes a sort of service industry,“ Bronwyn Beatty, a doctoral student at Massey University, said. The influx of internationally financed films, such as Lord of the Rings and the Last Samurai, had increased the costs of film production in New Zealand. “It pushes up the price of hiring things and so on, making things hard for local filmmakers.“