The second new Lord of the Rings film is in the works…with Stephen Colbert
The Hunt for Gollum
Peter Jackson dropped a video on YouTube courtesy of the official Warner Bros. channel. The director popped in to bring fans a special update for the film, which he says will be the first of many small blogs. Set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hunt for Gollum follows Aragorn’s perilous quest to capture Gollum before the creature can reveal the ring’s location to Sauron. The story hails from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s footnotes. Kate Winslet was recently announced to have joined the cast of the film, which includes the original trilogy members Elijah Wood (Mr. Frodo Baggins), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), and Andy Serkis (Gollum).
The “truthiness” of a new film
The real purpose of the video, however, is to reveal the exciting news that the second of the two new Lord of the Rings films is now in the works at Warner Bros. Jackson would cue in a new friend to help him talk about the development. The friend would be revealed to be Late Night talk show host Stephen Colbert. The studio is officially announcing that Colbert, who is a lifelong Tolkien devotee, will write the next film, which sports the working title Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, along with Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. The movie is set to be produced by WingNut Films in association with Spartina Industries.
The official synopsis of Shadow of the Past reads,
“Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo – Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”
Colbert would tell Jackson, “You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me. But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [The Fellowship of the Ring] that ya’ll never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ [Chapter III] through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’ [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
Elijah Wood on getting the band back together
While we wait for more on Shadow of the Past, last year, Elijah Wood would talk at DesertCon about the pleasure of reuniting with the creatives on the original films. He would explain, “There’s some wonderful people involved. The thing that is so exciting is, it’s really getting the creative band back together…the kind of creative brain trust behind Lord of the Rings: Fran [Walsh], Peter [Jackson], Philippa [Boyens], they’re heavily involved. And then, the same production designers. It’s going to be shot in New Zealand. So, it’s going to carry with it such continuity with so many of the people who are a part of Lord of the Rings, and I’m really excited about that. It feels like getting that old machine up and running again with all of the right people. So I’m really excited. There’s gonna be some fun bits that I think people are gonna be stoked about.”
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