Warner Bros. has announced that Stephen Colbert and his son are developing a new "Lord of the Rings" movie. The video announcement was posted on the studio's social media accounts and featured franchise director Peter Jackson talking about Andy Serkis' upcoming LOTR film "The Hunt for Gollum": "Andy is doing a terrific job. It's looking amazing. The script is coming together really well and I think it’s going to be a really good film."
Jackson then introduced his "very special partner" who will help develop the next film titled "The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past". At that moment, "The Late Show" host Stephen Colbert patched in through a video call and explained that the plot of his movie is based on chapters from "The Fellowship of the Ring" that didn't make it into Jackson's 2001 adaptation.
Here's what Colbert had to say about the project: "You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me. But 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. It’s basically the chapter 'Three Is Company' [Chapter III] through 'Fog on the Barrow-Downs' [Chapter VIII]. 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?"
Colbert added that he discussed the idea with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, and worked out a framing device for the film. Colbert also talked to Jackson, and over the last two years, they’ve worked with screenwriter Philippa Boyens to develop a script.
Here is the film's official synopsis: "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".
This isn't Colbert's first collaboration with Peter Jackson. Colbert had a small role in 2013's "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug", and also directed Jackson, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood in the 2019 short film "Darrylgorn" which was set in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.
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