Last year, news broke that Warner Bros./New Line had secured the rights necessary to produce new live-action Lord of the Rings movies, and would be doing so imminently. We didn’t know much, other than that further adaptations would be limited to the Third Age of Middle-earth, in which both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are set. (Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series is set in the Second Age.) “There is a lot of material, even in just the Third Age, that could be interesting to see adapted in some form, to be sure,” I wrote at the time of this news. “But we’re probably just going to end up with the adventures of Young Aragorn or something like that instead.”
Further details have emerged that prove me right . . . sort of. According to Deadline, the first of two new planned Lord of the Rings films will focus on Gollum, the once Hobbit-like creature Smeagol whose long possession of the One Ring twisted and corrupted his mind and body. Andy Serkis, who portrayed the creature via motion capture in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, will return, not just as Gollum, but also as director. Trilogy screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens will return for this script, with Jackson returning in a producer role. The planned release date is sometime in 2026.
It’s an understandable direction for a revival of Middle-earth on screen to take. If the working title of “The Hunt for Gollum” is any indication, the film will focus on Gollum’s exploits between the events of The Hobbit, when he loses the One Ring to Bilbo Baggins, and The Lord of the Rings, when his fate intersects with that of the new Ringbearer, Frodo Baggins. A lot happens to Gollum during this period. Much of it is not covered or only hinted at in currently released films (with one exception; more below). But it involves both characters (Aragorn, Gandalf, Sauron, Shelob) and locales (the Dead Marshes, Mordor, Mirkwood, Dale) already shown on screen. It’s a perfect combination of old and new for a Hollywood obsessed with its precious existing intellectual property (IP) yet also looking to find justification for telling a story in the first place.
So will it be any good? I have my doubts. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, though not without flaws, was something of a moviemaking miracle. And a decade later, we learned how much of a miracle it was, when Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, involving much of the same creative team, nonetheless failed to reach the same artistic heights. So a return to Middle-earth with many of the same players is no guarantee of success.
It is also unlikely that, 20 years later, the blockbuster-averse Viggo Mortensen would return as a young(er) Aragorn, or that Ian McKellen (now 84) would reprise his role as Gandalf. If this new film covered parts of Gollum’s story involving these characters, would it recast their roles? (Or resort to some ghastly de-aging technology, à la Dial of Destiny?) Or if it skips over those parts, would it instead double-down on the conveniently time-insensitive effects shots, thereby attenuating the grounded approach that helped make Jackson’s original trilogy so effective? Finally: Is 2026 simply too quick a turnaround for a satisfying return to Middle-earth to be produced? The whole enterprise already seems like a cash grab to me; a rush to production does not inspire confidence.
But whether this movie is made is not for me to decide. All I have to decide is whether to see the movie given to us. In the meantime, Lord of the Rings fans interested in the events the new film will likely cover can watch the low-budget 2009 fan film also, confusingly, called “The Hunt for Gollum” here (or embedded below). It’s been a while since I’ve watched it, but I remember it as being okay, given the constraints of its production.