Warner Bros has announced that the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum will open in theaters December 17, 2027 (via Variety). Which will come as a surprise if you, like me, missed that little stealth announcement last summer.
Frankly, though, I cannot believe they’re making a whole-ass movie about Gollum set between the end of Bilbo’s Birthday Party and the entry of the Fellowship into the Mines of Moria.
Gollum will be played, of course, by Andy Serkis via CGI just as Gollum has been played for 20-some years. Serkis is directing the movie, which is being produced by Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movie trilogy filmmakers Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh.
On second thought, I can fully believe they’re making a movie about Gollum. There’s only so much territory within the canon of Tolkien’s work to be mined for events that Warner Bros has legal rights to in some way make a movie about and make money off of.
And, yeah, canonically Aragorn and Gandalf go hunting for Gollum after Gandalf is like “wait that’s probably the mega-evil bad guy ring.” So I guess that’s what they’re gonna make a movie about.
The movie won’t necessarily go this way, but it’s not the best sign that a videogame about Gollum, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, crashed and burned so hard in 2023 that its developer just… decided to get out of games entirely.
Gollum didn’t carry that story—so can the angst and pathos of sympathetic antagonist Gollum carry a movie? I don’t know. We’re clearly bound to find out, though.
They’ll probably do horrible CGI orcs again, like in The Hobbit movies. I’m at least expecting to hate that.
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