"The Hunt for Gollum": a new "Lord of the Rings" film will be released in 2026
He's doing it again: Peter Jackson is turning his attention to another Middle-earth film. A new film centred around the conflicted Gollum is set to hit the big screen in 2026.
Fans of Peter Jackson's films from J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" universe can rejoice: a new instalment is to be released in 2026. This was announced by David Zaslav, Managing Director of Warner Bros. Discovery, on Thursday during a conference on the group's quarterly figures.
The new film will focus on the character Gollum. The adaptation is still at an early stage of script development. The film is to be directed by Andy Serkins, who has a close connection to Gollum: He himself played the largely CGI-animated creature from 2001 to 2003 in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and around ten years later in the "Hobbit" trilogy. This time, he will once again slip into his iconic role as Gollum. Zaslav did not reveal any details about the plot.
What could the new film be about?
The working title of the new film is "The Hunt for Gollum". In Tolkien's first "The Lord of the Rings" book, such a hunt or search for Gollum is described in passing. Gollum had found Sauron's long-lost Ring of Power 400 years earlier and guarded it like a treasure. Then the hobbit Bilbo takes the ring from Gollum in the book "The Little Hobbit". Bilbo later tells his old friend, the wizard Gandalf, about it. Gandalf wants to find out more about the ring and sets off in search of Gollum. After finding it and losing it again, he asks the ranger Aragorn to capture Gollum once more.
A non-commercial film called "The Hunt for Gollum", which was developed and produced exclusively by fans, was released back in 2009. It focuses precisely on this search for Gollum. You can watch the 40-minute film here. Warner Bros. had the film blocked on YouTube due to its visual proximity to the original trilogy.
Peter Jackson and other actors from the earlier films are involved
Peter Jackson, director of the two previous trilogies, is also back on board, but this time as a producer. Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplays for the previous instalments with Jackson, are also back as producers and screenwriters. The visual effects will be created by New Zealand studio Weta, which was also employed on the previous films.
The announcement is not entirely surprising. Back in February 2023, Warner Bros. announced its intention to develop new films about the world of Middle-earth. "The Hunt for Gollum" will apparently be the first of two adaptations, as the magazine The Hollywood Reporter reports.
The series "The Rings of Power", which has been produced by Amazon Prime Video since 2023, is not connected to the films or their creators. It is loosely based on events from the First Age of Middle-earth and takes place thousands of years before the plot of "The Lord of the Rings". <p
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