Which Peter Jackson film was the first of his Middle-earth movies to be released?

The Fellowship of the Ring was the first of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth films to be released.

The film premiered in 2001 and began Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It introduces the One Ring, Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship formed to carry the Ring toward Mordor. The story ends after the Fellowship has been broken apart, setting up the two sequels.

The production was filmed alongside The Two Towers and The Return of the King in New Zealand. This large-scale back-to-back production allowed locations, performers and visual designs to carry across the trilogy, although the films were released separately between 2001 and 2003.

The Hobbit trilogy was made later, beginning with An Unexpected Journey in 2012. That later film is set earlier in Tolkien’s fictional chronology, but it was not the first Jackson Middle-earth release.