Plot Details Revealed For Stephen Colbert's Sequel Movie To 'The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King'

Warner Bros. and Peter Jackson announced that Stephen Colbert is writing a sequel to Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King film.

In a post to social media, Jackson introduced Colbert sharing, “I was just explaining to the folks about the next Tolkien movie after Hunt for Gollum and the fact that we’ve partnered up with you to develop a script.

Colbert then shared what his vision behind the script is, “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’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs.’ 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?'”

“And I started talking it over with my son Peter [McGee], who is also a screenwriter, and we worked out what we thought would work especially as a framing device for that story,” he added.

From there he shared that he had been working on the script with Jackson and writer and producer Phillipa Boyens for at least two years on the film.

While Colbert referenced the chapters in The Fellowship of the Ring, a logline for the film states:

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.

J.R.R. Tolkien infamously chose not to finish his sequel to The Return of the King, which was titled The New Shadow. In Letter 256 penned to Colin Bailey in 1964 he explained, “I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse.”

“I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing,” he concluded.

In Letter 338 to Fr. Douglas Carter in June 1972 just 15 months before his death, Tolkien shared more details revealing he had written “the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn.”

In it, he “discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.”

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