A new Lord of the Rings movie was announced by Warner Bros. on Thursday, marking a cinematic return to the Oscar-winning film franchise based on the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien.
“Yesssss, Precious. The time has come once more to venture into the unknown with my dear friends,” Serkis said in a statement, playing off the slithery, CGI-rendered Gollum character that he performed to much acclaim in the original film trilogy.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav first announced the new films during an earnings call Thursday, with “The Hunt for Gollum” tentatively scheduled to release in 2026. The film’s script is still being written.
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The Lord of the Rings trilogy from Jackson adapted Tolkien’s classic novels, originally released in the ’50s. Those books — “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” — center on a young hobbit named Frodo and his friends, tasked with bringing a destructive magical ring to its demise in the fiery land of Mordor, with plenty of skirmishes between kings, elves, wizards and orcs along the way.
Gollum — a corrupted hobbit and sometimes villain played by Serkis in a motion-capture suit — became one of the most popular stars of the original movie trilogy. The technology used for the performance was groundbreaking at the time and “changed the course of special effects,” according to Vulture.
The three Lord of the Ring films from Jackson earned about $3 billion combined at the global box office. Jackson also directed a trilogy based on Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” novel in the mid-2010s, serving as a prequel to the main LOTR films. Though the films weren’t as beloved critically, they still earned about $3 billion at the global box office.
Fans and critics on social media immediately speculated about the new film’s plot, given that Gollum appeared to die at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
An identically named British fan film “The Hunt for Gollum” was released in 2009 based on appendixes Tolkien wrote expanding the universe of his books. Set near the beginning of the original trilogy, the plot of that film centered on Gandalf sending Aragorn to capture Gollum before he could reveal the One Ring’s location to Mordor ruler Sauron.
It’s not clear if the upcoming film will concern the same episode, but you won’t need to wait until 2026 for new Lord of the Rings storytelling. An animated prequel from Warner Bros, “Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” will hit theaters Dec. 13, 2024. And Amazon (whose founder and board chair Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post) is producing the “Lord of the Ring: The Rings of Power” television show, which is set thousands of years before the original trilogy.
