A Lord of the Rings sequel has been confirmed in a new video by iconic director Peter Jackson, and it’s going to be written by late night host Stephen Colbert.
In the type of news you have to read several times to believe, Peter Jackson has announced that, following the upcoming Lord of the Rings Gollum spin-off film and the end of his Late Night contract, Colbert will be writing a sequel to the original trilogy titled Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.
Colbert is a well-known Lord of the Rings superfan, having done segments on his Late Night show in the past in which he answered incredibly complicated lore questions about the series.
The late-night comedian will begin work after the end of The Late Show, a cancellation that was widely criticised due to the news coming just after Colbert had criticised CBS parent company Paramount for making a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump.
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Despite Colbert’s love of Lord of the Rings being pretty well documented however, fans are very much not convinced by the idea for the sequel.
The concept for the film has been heavily criticised, and the plot is a pretty odd choice
The film will somehow be both a sequel and an adaptation of several chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring which never made it into the original film. Shadow of the Past will be set 14 years after Return of the King and Frodo leaving Middle Earth behind to leave with the elves.
The news was announced by Peter Jackson and Stephen Colbert in the Instagram video below.
It will star Sam, Merry, and Pippin setting out to retrace the steps of their first adventure, focusing on a section of the book in which the hobbits are saved from otherworldly threats by Tom Bombadil, a member of the Fellowship who was excluded from Peter Jackson’s beloved films.
If this concept sounds pretty bizarre to you, you aren’t alone. One fan posted on X saying: “I had to double check if this was a joke because that sounds like the dumbest sh*t I have ever heard.”
Lord of the Rings fans have been failed for years, and this news won’t be reassuring them
Another fan’s viral tweet on the news slammed the idea, and sums up many fans feelings about the Lord of the Rings series at the moment.
They posted: “I’m not even doing a bit. This is the worst possible idea for a Tolkien movie and it has made my quality of life worse.
"I think intellectual property has reached an endpoint.
"This isn’t a movie idea. This isn’t even a book idea. This is barely an idea in the first place.”
Ever since The Lord of Rings: Return of the King, fans have been served up lacklustre live action TV and Film. Each The Hobbit film was worse than the last, Rings of Power has been widely criticised despite Amazon ploughing over $1 billion into it, and The Hunt for Gollum was similarly slammed by fans as a bizarre choice.
In the same way that Star Wars has become oversaturated (compare the excitement for The Force Awakens to The Mandalorian and Grogu) it has also become far less exciting with each new Lord of the Rings project is announced, and Shadow of the Past may be the final nail in the coffin.
Topics: TV and Film, Film, Lord Of The Rings, Celebrity
Michael Slavin