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Lord of the Rings Movies

Stephen Colbert To Write Next 'Lord of the Rings' Movie (cnn.com) 140

Posted by BeauHD from the long-time-fan dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Stephen Colbert already has a new job lined up for when he ends his 11-year run as host of "The Late Show" in May -- the comedian and well-known J.R.R. Tolkien superfan announced he will co-write and develop a new film in the blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" franchise. Colbert joined "LOTR" director Peter Jackson to reveal the news in a video announcement.

"I'm pretty happy about it. You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me," the late-night host told Jackson, who led the Oscar-winning team behind the nearly $6 billion original "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies. [...] Colbert said the next installment will be based on parts of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" book that didn't make it into the original movies. "The thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in (The Fellowship of the Ring) that y'all never developed into the first movie back in the day ... and I thought, 'Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story.'" he said.

Colbert said he discussed the idea with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, to work out the framing of the story. "It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile and give you a call, but about two years ago, I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it," Colbert told Jackson. Colbert said he, McGee and Jackson have been working alongside screenwriter Philippa Boyens on the development of the story. "I could not be happier to say that they loved it, and so that's what we're going to be working on," Colbert said. Colbert's LOTR movie, tentatively titled "Shadow of the Past," will be the second of two new upcoming films in the franchise from Warner Bros. Discovery. The first of which is called "The Hunt for Gollum" due to be released in 2027.
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Stephen Colbert To Write Next 'Lord of the Rings' Movie More

Stephen Colbert To Write Next 'Lord of the Rings' Movie

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  • wHY? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ozzymodus12 ( 8111534 )
    Early April Fools?
    • Money, obviously. After the dead of Christopher Tolkien, the Tolkien estate has taken to IP-mining to a degree that Disney would be ashamed of.
  • It doesn't really match the types of things he usually writes for. Kind of a fish out of water scenario. Maybe this comes from the "anything has to be better than recent LOTR shows" bucket.
    • yeah, a bit worried about this one. I like Colbert he is funny and sharp, but don't know about his screen writing chops. Also, please do not cast aged actors past their prime. Please.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 )

        Also, please do not cast aged actors past their prime. Please.

        What do you mean? The main Hobbits are usually portrayed by younger actors. Gandalf should be portrayed by an older actor. Elves should be somewhere in between. If everyone is young it looks dumb.

        • I hear Tom Selleck is being cast for Galadriel.
        • I think he was talking about casting Orlando Bloom to play a younger Legolas ten years after he portrayed him. It was unnecessary as The Hobbit book did not feature Legolas. It has been a while since I read the book, but I only remember Legolas being mentioned briefly in the book.

        • How about a Muppet babies version. All the characters you love, but they are toddlers.

      • When the original LOTR films were announced people were extremely skeptical and I mean for good reason, up until then Jackson was known as a horror-comedy-schlock director with one compelling drama movie under his belt. Sounds like a recipe for disaster no?

        Very few film scripts make it from a typewriter to the screen without involvement for other people no matter what the credits say. Star Wars 1977 has one credited writer and we all know the story of how much help Lucas had when it came time to actually

        • I was skeptical because I thought there was far too much in the books to fit into a movie, i.e. it would take at least 10 movies to cover the entire Trilogy. Apparently I was wrong, and they made smart choice about what they could cut out without ruining the story. But then, I'm not a LotR expert like Colbert.

          • I'll admit I had a really hard time accepting the original theatrical release as I had just finished the books. They cut out a decent amount. The further I got away from when I read the book, the more entertaining the movies became. I really enjoyed the extended versions as well.

            If you are married to a given book series, no film will ever do it justice. If you read the book 20 years ago, you probably forgot half the book(s) anyway.

            My best example would be The Wheel of Time series. It's far to large to ever

        • Colbert is also "passionate" about a lot of things I frankly don't care about.
          Passion alone does not make a good outcome.

    • Why not?

      He usually writes about a mad wanna-be usurper of power who's trying to destroy the world in order to rule over it.

      Sounds pretty much like the lord of the rings.

  • ... Fantasy worlds out there that would look epic as a AAA fantasy blockbuster triology. Raymond E. Feist comes to mind. Bernard Hennen, Guy Gavrial Kay, Brandon Sanderson and countless other top-shelf fantasy authors and epic worlds. Can't we just leave LOTR be? It's gotten an excellent film adaption, one that will stand the test of time if it doesn't get diluted with trash like it already partially has. Please stop right now.

    I think we may be truly witnessing the dawn of western culture and it effing hurts.

    • This one way to keep him nice about being censored...

      He's a super nerd on lord of the rings. Not sure this will turn out well except Jackson will tone it down like he did the books... but hopefully not pad it out extremely like he did the Hobbit. Perhaps this is the job-- make the padding not so bad as they stretch out more and more from little.

      Interesting his son took his mother's last name.

      I wonder if Lord Trump orders this project scrapped out of spite? It could happen and likely would if the Eye of Tr

    • What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

      The first thing about adapting a book is reading it at least once, and Peter Jackson skipped that step.

      • What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

        Enough with the gate keeping.

        You cant make a literal version of LOTR unless you want an extremely boring trilogy of unwatchable 9 hour films.

        You know full well that while it deviated from t

        • You know full well that while it deviated from the books in some minor and a couple of major, ways (they did our boy Tom Bombadil wrong)

          They only left him out, they did much worse to Faramir.

          Tom Bombadil was important to the books, to give a certain feeling. But not so much to the movies, which felt epic enough without him.

        • they did our boy Tom Bombadil wrong

          This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

    • why?

      maah-ney

  • I love LOTR but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nicholas Grayhame ( 10502767 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @04:36PM (#66061706)

    Colbert's LOTR movie, tentatively titled "Shadow of the Past," will be the second of two new upcoming films in the franchise from Warner Bros. Discovery.

    ...I'm not giving Ellison and his cronies even a single penny

  • Colbert is a noted Tolkien fanatic, I never watched much of him but sheerly through internet osmosis I know he loves the property. He's also been getting into adapting fiction, owning the rights to and trying to a produce a series from The Chronicles of Amber, one of the major inspirations for Game of Thrones. I guess I don't know if he has any skill at writing narrative fiction, but unlike the dreadful LOTR TV show produciton he's at least got the enthusiasm and appreciation for the subject matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mackil ( 668039 )
      Exactly. I've never watched him in any form, but I do remember him from the BTS of the Hobbit, and some internet videos showcasing his knowledge. He's a real fan. That's really what LOTR needs.

      If Peter Jackson is attached, I'd watch it.

  • He's going to Kathleen Kennedy the LOTR (Score:3)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @05:26PM (#66061814)

    Can you short a franchise?

  • I have heard Colbert talk about the LOTR universe before, and I swear he has even the hundreds of pages of those LOTR appendices memorized (if you've got the books, you know what I'm referring to). He really is a Tolkien super-fanboy.

  • A little poetic license can only help, and they're so cute

  • Still a shame (Score:3)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @06:15PM (#66061926) Homepage
    It's still a big shame Amazon didn't hire (or wasn't allowed to by the Tolkien estate) Peter Jackson for Rings of Power, it would have been so much better as it is now (still wonder how these nobodies got to do this billion dollar series).

    • Re: Still a shame (Score:2, Informative)

      by reanjr ( 588767 )

      Rings of Power is way better than Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy.

      • Not really, I liked the Hobbit, but it did suffer immensely due to Jackson not having gotten the time to prepare properly when he was forced to take over from the director that left. They didn't get any extra time and even had to write scenes on the day they had to shoot it. So with that in mind , he did a pretty good job.
  • We've all seen it where openly partisan writers or directors, especially Netflix and Disney, incorporate their politics into their movies or shows and destroy their essence in the process such as taking the audience on irrelevant side quests exploring sexuality or gender and add zero context to the plot and take up way too much screen time. Hopefully Colbert can be impartial and write in a way that is purely converting the books into a script.

    • ... Leni Riefenstahl wasn't available.

    • Colbert was invited to speak at the White House Correspondents' Dinner reportedly because the conservative administration thought he was actually conservative.

    • We've all seen it where openly partisan writers or directors, especially Netflix and Disney, incorporate their politics into their movies or shows and destroy their essence in the process

      LOTR is about freedom vs oppression, had not just strong but powerful female characters from the get-go, and the morals are about ordinary people defeating evil by being true to their fellowship. It's woke AF from start to finish.

  • This is from the Kurtzman school of film. Virtue signal, create woke garbage, and anyone who doesn't like it is ist. The purpose is demoralization, not money-making.
  • All this time I was certain no one could be worse than Peter Jackson.

    This summer marks 50 years since I first read Lord of the Rings. Maybe I should celebrate by unplugging from this retarded hellscape ... though today's preview of HBO's Harry Potter series does promise some redemption.
  • Stephen Colbert is the smartest, most talented human in the world. I couldn't care less about LOTR, but talk about a Renaissance Man!
  • Zoonlandia's national animal is the White Polydactyl Shorthaired Housecat, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

  • Colbert seems to truly care. He is not venturing into non-canon space. The gaps in the Fellowship movie were significant, and in my mind important. I felt that Glorfindel and Bombadil were too important to be sacrificed to fit the media. I don't hold out much hope for Glorfindel, because his actual actions in the story are given to Arwen in the movie, but Bombadil was just skipped. So based on what little we know it looks like this will be the story of Bombadil, obviously the barrow wights, and hopefully

  • Given that what I've read, he actually *cares* about the BOOKS.

    My issue is all the pics we see of what's supposed to be Tom Bombadil... um, er, are they all color blind? "Old Tom Bombadil, bright blue his coat, and his boots are yellow."

  • I'm not seeing how he is going to incorporate Trump into it. Maybe a "No Rings" demonstration?

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