The sign on Wellington's airport terminal says it all: Welcome to Middle Earth.
From the moment in the late 1990s when it was announced The Lord of the Rings trilogy would be made in New Zealand by a local boy made good, filmmaker Peter Jackson, the nation's film industry and film-related tourism took a dramatic step forward.
Its windy capital, Wellington, segued from being literally cool - a beautiful but chilly city of about 200,000 people at the bottom of the world - to figuratively. Now it's "the coolest little capital in the world", according to travel guidebooks publisher Lonely Planet, the kind of place where an international actor in a local cafe - Ian McKellen, James Nesbitt, Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen - barely warrants a turn of the head.
The city embraced The Lord of the Rings: riders dressed up as Ringwraiths rode on horseback through Wellington for the Australasian premiere of the first film in that trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; and during a break at a New Zealand-England cricket match there, a chanting crowd, urged on by Jackson, voiced the orcs' chants.
For a time, the visitor's introduction to this Middle Earth Down Under began even before landing - with Air New Zealand's safety announcements being made by a cast wearing hairy Bilbo Baggins feet and pointy ears to match, plus a cameo by Jackson. Upon landing at the airport, one sees oversized Scrabble letters at the Discover New Zealand store that spell out "Welcome to Middle Earth" - next to the Hobbit merchandise - and the bookstore stocks the Moleskine Hobbit journal.
But all this just hints at the significance of Lord of the Rings-engendered movie industry to this city, and the national economy. A Tourism New Zealand survey found six per cent of all visitors the year after the 2003 release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King said the film was a motivation for visiting.
"The following decade, international visitors to Wellington increased by 50 per cent," says Positively Wellington Tourism CEO David Perks.