By Mallory Mattingly
Creating another LORD OF THE RINGS movie wasn’t Peter Jackson’s plan, but when Stephen Colbert pitched an idea to him, he couldn’t pass it up.
“He was re-reading Lord of the Rings over Christmas and thought this section would make a great film,” Jackson told Deadline of Colbert at the Cannes Film Festival. “He pitched this whole idea…I said it sounds interesting, let’s have a go at this, doing a treatment. Philippa Boyens flew over and Colbert has come down to New Zealand a couple of times. This is before he knew his show was going to get canned.”
“It’s a part of LORD OF THE RINGS that we never filmed. There were these big chunks of LORD OF THE RINGS that we skipped over,” Jackson said of his original LOTR movie trilogy.
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He told Variety that Colbert being able to shift his focus to THE LORD OF THE RINGS helped him cope with the loss of his late-night show.
“So it was like, okay, one day he’s going to be a late-night talk show host, and the next day he’s going to be a Tolkien scriptwriter,” Jackson said.
The working title for Colbert’s movie is THE LORD OF THE RINGS: SHADOWS OF THE PAST.
“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,” the logline of the movie reads. Colbert is writing, alongside his son Peter McGee and Boyens.
The movie is based on the section “‘Fog on the Barrow-downs,’ the eighth chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the Hobbits are trapped by a Barrow-wight in an unnatural fog. The story also includes a fan-favorite character omitted from the previous films, Tom Bombadil. The feature is being adapted from chapters three through eight of JRR Tolkien’s book,” according to Deadline.
Colbert’s THE LATE SHOW is coming to an end soon.
“I know that the show had to end at some time. I did not expect it to end this way,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
Meanwhile, fans will return to Middle-earth in 2027 with the release of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM, directed by Andy Serkis.
“The Gollum/Sméagol character has always fascinated me because Gollum reflects the worst of human nature, whilst his Sméagol side is, arguably, quite sympathetic,” Jackson, who is producing the movie, told Deadline. “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.”
Further details about SHADOWS OF THE PAST, such as casting or a release date, have not been shared, but LOTR fans certainly have a lot to look forward to in the coming years.
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