Warner Bros. dropped the full cast for The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum during its CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas Tuesday, settling months of speculation. The film arrives December 17, 2027. Production begins in May.
Andy Serkis returns to direct and play Gollum and his alter ego Sméagol. Ian McKellen is back as Gandalf the Grey. Elijah Wood returns as Frodo Baggins. Lee Pace reprises Thranduil, the Elvenking of Mirkwood, from the Hobbit films. Kate Winslet joins as Marigol, a new character believed by fans to be Sméagol’s mother. Jamie Dornan takes the role of Strider, the Dúnedain ranger who will eventually be crowned King Elessar, but here is still operating in the shadows under his ranger name. Leo Woodall plays Halvard, a second Dúnedain companion on the hunt. Peter Jackson is producing alongside Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
Serkis released a statement with the announcement: “Across two trilogies, a mark of a Middle-earth film has always been the formidable array of talent brought to bear in every role. The Hunt for Gollum continues in that tradition, and I am delighted to announce the return of two of Middle-earth’s most beloved performers, alongside some exceptionally talented new additions to Tolkien’s world.”
There is also a second film in development. Stephen Colbert is co-writing The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past alongside Boyens and Peter McGee, with the title drawn from the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring. No director is attached.
But there’s problems with the idea for The Hunt For Gollum even before getting to Colber.
The source material for The Hunt for Gollum is a few pages in Tolkien’s appendices. Gandalf sends Strider to track Gollum before Sauron can torture the location of Bilbo’s ring out of him. That is the whole story. There is no act structure waiting to be discovered, no untold saga buried in the footnotes. What Tolkien wrote down is what Tolkien wrote down. Everything else is invention wearing Tolkien’s clothes, and the people writing this film have already told the public exactly how they feel about invention wearing Tolkien’s clothes.
Boyens, during the press run for The War of the Rohirrim, explained her approach to the franchise’s mythology this way: “We can’t do anything to those books. Those books are going to stand as these masterpieces... We can’t ruin them.” She also said that “sometimes the most compelling story is the untold story.” That film built a girlboss original character named Héra out of a two-word reference in Tolkien to “Helm’s daughter,” dropped her into anime-style action sequences, and had a character at the end of the film tell the audience not to bother looking for Héra in the old songs. The reason she is not in the old songs is that Tolkien did not write her. The film did not feel like Tolkien. It felt like someone who has read Tolkien but disagrees with his instincts.
Boyens is back as a co-writer on The Hunt for Gollum. That record matters.
Then there is Colbert. The Shadow of the Past film, which comes after this one, is being co-written by the host of a late-night television show whose primary qualification for the job appears to be that he is a famous Tolkien enthusiast. Tolkien’s legendarium is one of the most carefully constructed mythological systems in literary history. “He’s a fan” is not a writing credit that is going to make speculative fans comfortable.
Replacing Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn is the other issue nobody wants to name directly. Mortensen’s performance was one of the defining performances of early 2000s cinema. Jamie Dornan is a capable actor, known for Belfast and The Fall. He is not obviously wrong for the role. But the role is 24 years old in audience memory, and Mortensen set the bar at a height that has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with presence.
The original trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion and won 17 Academy Awards, including Best Picture for The Return of the King, which tied the all-time record with 11 wins in a single night. The last live-action Middle-earth film hit theaters in 2014. Amazon spent three seasons on Rings of Power and handed the franchise’s critics more ammunition than anyone could have anticipated.
This film has the right producing team and some of the right returning faces. Whether that is enough to compensate for a screenplay built on material two pages long, a co-writer who called fan criticism dismissible, and a second film co-written by a late-night host, is a question December 2027 will answer.
Are you going in with hope or with your guard up?
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