It’s Friday 17 May 2024 – and a seismic shift in The Lord of the Rings adaptations has been felt around the world. Here’s all the news you may have missed:
Rings of Power S2 gets a trailer, a date, and a BTS video
Prime Video unveiled season 2 of The Rings of Power at their UPFRONTS, an advertising industry event designed to lure more advertisers to buying commercials during shows. Prime also updated the show’s social media handles from LOTRonPrime to @TheRingsOfPower and released a 3 minute Behind-the-scenes look at S2.
Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuts Thursday August 29, 2024 with a 3-episode premiere, then settles into weekly episodes for the remaining 5 weeks.
LEGO Barad-Dur tower date and price
The 5,471 piece set is available June 1 for $459.99.
We see you. You can't hide your passion for the new Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr™ set ☄️ pic.twitter.com/wx7ANVApcS
The first movie in the new WB LOTR license is The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, who also will play the character again. Produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, with a screenplay by The War of the Rohirrim writers Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. Read more about how they landed on this particular story in the Legendarium.
In a technical slip up, the automated YouTube and WB copyright system temporarily took down the 15-year-old fan film The Hunt for Gollum, which was back up within hours and is still free to watch.
Rohirrim preview in June while scoring continues remotely
Exec Producer Jason Demarco announced a “big chunk of the film” will be screened at Annecy animation festival in June, and shared a new logo for the movie.
Composer Stephen Gallagher continues to post updates on the scoring of the new Anime LOTR movie coming this December.
Middle-earth Enterprises owner Embracer Freemode shared an in-depth interview with CEO Lee Guinchard, where he lays out the strategy going forward to build The Lord of the Rings into a premium, high quality brand that is collaborative and fan-first.
LOTR Executive Producer Mark Ordesky has teamed up with the Blair Witch creators to launch a new fantasy project: an omni-channel disc-world universe with a dice game on Kickstarter.
Black Milk Clothing has finally restocked its official LOTR apparel, including this Arwen dress.
Christopher Lee feature-length documentary, featuring a brand new interview with Peter Jackson, enters its final Blu-ray pre-order days with a Dracula inspired premium box set.
The Hunt for Gollum Producer Peter Jackson has opened up to Deadline on why this story, and this character, are right for this crucial moment to extend a Middle-earth resume that’s reaped $6 billion at the box office. It is a follow-up discussion to the Middle-earth shattering announcement of two new The Lord of the Rings movies from last week.
“The Gollum/Sméagol character has always fascinated me because Gollum reflects the worst of human nature, whilst his Sméagol side is, arguably, quite sympathetic. I think he connects with readers and film audiences alike, because there’s a little bit of both of them in all of us. We really want to explore his backstory and delve into those parts of his journey we didn’t have time to cover in the earlier films. It’s too soon to know who will cross his path, but suffice to say we will take our lead from Professor Tolkien.”
Peter Jackson, via Deadline
The new feature film, The Hunt for Gollum (tentative title), seems to be a natural follow up from the writing and producing team behind The War of the Rohirrim. Newcomers Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou wrote Rohirrim under the watchful guidance of Oscar winner (and Phoebe’s mother) Philippa Boyens, and the results have been impressive enough that they are already been engaged to work on this second Middle-earth film.
Peter Jackson and partner Fran Walsh are not officially involved in Rohirrim, but the activity around Weta from all their old collaborators may have been enough inspiration to get back into the game. Just as his original plan for The Hobbit was to hand off directing duties to someone else, Jackson has brought in Gollum himself Andy Serkis. “Their search for excellence never ends, and now I get to help reach that bar again. It was Philippa who first called me actually and said, look, this is what we’re thinking. And I was just flushed with a sort of, oh my God, I’m going back in there,” says Serkis.
Andy was already shooting his shot early last year, telling BroBible he was ready to come back on one condition: that Jackson is involved.
The Imaginarium production company, founded by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish, will help bring The Hunt for Gollum to life. They previously made Mowgli on Netflix and have three state-of-the-art motion capture studios in London, used on everything from Planet of the Apes movies to Napoleon. Andy is excited to film Gollum with complete mobility and freedom that the latest technology from Apes and Pirates movies now allow, and he is hyping up a more expressive full-body performance for this new iteration of the character.
Andy Serkis has kept busy directing feature films Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Breathe, and Animal Farm. Fans who have watched PJ’s The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Appendices will of course know Serkis was Second Unit Director on The Hobbit films. He has also received accolades playing Caesar in the recent Planet of the Apes movies, setting a new standard for digital character performance.
How does The Hunt for Gollum fit with the LOTR trilogy?
“We don’t want this film to be just the fourth film in the trilogy. This film has to work in its own way,” Jackson tells Deadline. “I know there’s plenty of people out there who will be like, oh no, why are they doing this? Why are they going back in? Well, that’s our job. Our job is going to have to be to prove why we think that it’s a good idea.”
So it’s absolutely thrilling to be able to go back and do a deep dive into his world again, and specifically into Gollum’s psychology. I know we’re all interested in investigating on a deeper level who that character is, and on top of that, to be able to direct and hopefully create a film which has its place within the canon, but also something that’s fresh and new and a different approach.”
Jackson confirms the films will shoot in and around New Zealand.
What characters will be in TheHunt for Gollum?
“We are just literally having very early state script discussions and ideas of exactly where and how we’re going to drop anchor with [Gollum] and his journey and how he is or comes into contact with other characters, and the characters that we know and don’t know. So still, I would hate to say anything that’s going to commit us at this point, because it’s literally all up for grabs.”
“We have the right to The Lord of the Rings and the appendices, and that’s it,” says Philippa Boyens. “Fans always get nervous that there’s only so much story that is in there. But look at War of the Rohirrim. It’s a page and a half at first glance in the books. But there are lots of threads in there throughout the book.”
But really, why Gollum?
“Gollum’s story is one of the most compelling to us in terms of a character that we couldn’t go as deeply into as we wanted to before, which sounds strange when you say that, given how familiar he is to everybody,” Boyens told Deadline. Gollum had 34 minutes of screen time in the LOTR trilogy, just above Legolas and Gimli who both have 31 minutes, plus he’s featured in The Hobbit in a big way. According to LOTRProject Gollum is the most-mentioned antagonist in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. Only eight characters receive more mentions across all the books, and they are all the main heroes. Of course, the data may be skewed because he always coughs his name twice.
Read the whole interview with Andy, Peter, and Philippa at Deadline.
Poster artist Paul Vicenti has written in with news on fan film, “Hunt For Gollum” at DragonCon where TheOneRing.net will also be presenting a panel (twice) on the very latest news on “The Hobbit”.
He writes: ” ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ will have it’s East Coast (US) premier at the Dragoncon Film festival this coming labor day weekend. Currently at over 3 million views online, this is a chance to see it as it should be seen- BIG! It is slated to show during the 10 AM screening block on Sunday morning September 6th. Though the actual filmakers will not be there, I will be representing the film ( I was one of the poster artists – see attatched) and will be happy to meet with and discuss the film with any interested parties.
Fans of the Lord of the Rings who have not yet had their fill of cinematic Middle-earth should make a date for Sunday 3 May at 4pm (UK time), when the internet and the Sci-Fi-London festival will simultaneously host the premiere of The Hunt for Gollum – a “film for fans by fans” knocked together for just 3,000 quid. According to the BBC, the film is set between The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring, and “tells the story of Aragorn as he sets out to discover the truth about the Ring”. Writer and director Chris Bouchard explained that, with the blessing of Tolkien Enterprises (as long as the project was non-profit, natch), he set about recruiting a vast cast of volunteers – including 160 credited crew and 60 who worked on visual effects alone. LoTR fan film set for net premiere
Simon Vozick-Levinson writes: I have no clue how The Hunt for Gollum has gotten past New Line Cinema and the J.R.R. Tolkien estate’s intellectual property lawyers. Nor do I care, because this “by fans, for fans” non-profit 40-minute Lord of the Rings tribute film looks awesome. As far as I can tell from the trailers, the plot, adapted from part of Tolkien’s voluminous appendices, is supposed to take place some time between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. EW Talks ‘The Hunt for Gollum’
The folks at Dailymotion send this in: On May 3rd (a week from Sunday), “The Hunt for Gollum” will make its debut on video sharing site Dailymotion. This high-production value, 45-minute film was a labor of love, produced by entirely by fans of the Tolkien trilogy on a volunteer basis over the past 2 years. Inspired by notes in the appendices of the book, the film follows Aragorn as he sets out to find the creature Gollum and discover the truth about the Ring.
Poster artist Paul Vicenti has written in with news on fan film, “Hunt For Gollum” at DragonCon where TheOneRing.net will also be presenting a panel (twice) on the very latest news on “The Hobbit”.