The Lord of the Rings, Stranger Things, Cowboy Bebop all resume production

Hollywood is creaking back to life after a long COVID-19 hiatus, with lots of high-profile shows resuming production.

This past March, the coronavirus pandemic tore through the world, interrupting businesses and lives. That’s still happening, but some businesses, at least, are clawing their way back, including Hollywood, which had to shut down filming on a variety of movies and TV shows thanks to the disease.

In fact, three major shows are resuming filming this week, starting with the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things in Atlanta. Eagle-eyed fans in the area have noticed things like the set for the Hawkins Family Video Store and Palace Arcade going back up, with filming presumably having officially started back up yesterday:

Stranger Things filmed a good chunk of material before things had to shut down, enough to release a teaser showing off the return of a fan-favorite character. With a lot of our characters now living apart, season 4 promises to be more of a globe-trotting affair than season 3 was, but we’ll have to wait a while before we find out the specifics. Once upon a time, we hoped that the new season might release this year, but with the COVID-19 shutdown, I think 2021 is the best we can hope for.

That year should be packed with delayed goodies. After enduring its own shutdown, Deadline reports that Amazon’s fabulously expensive Lord of the Rings show is now back in production in New Zealand, which was also the place where director Peter Jackson shot his Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. But the new show won’t retread that old ground: it’s set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, long before characters like Frodo and Sam were born, although immortal characters like Galadriel will still be around.

The Lord of the Rings has an interesting production history. Amazon has already ordered two seasons, and the crew had filmed a good part of the first two episodes before the coronavirus came knocking. The funny thing is that, after those two episodes were done, the show was going to take a planned hiatus anyway to assess and tweak while the writing team penned more episodes. With the hiatus coming early, showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have already started to map out and write season 2, so perhaps now the team can go full speed ahead.

Finally, Netflix is set to resume filming on its live-action remake of the popular anime series Cowboy Bebop tomorrow. This show also began filming a while back, but had to delay because star John Cho, who’s playing the stylish space bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, injured his knee. This was in the fall, before COVID-19 had reared its head, but that delay bled right into a new one. All told, it’s been about a year since the show shot anything.

But that’s over now. Relatedly, James Cameron just announced that he’d finished production on Avatar 2 and was nearly done with Avatar 3, so sets are springing back to life everywhere! There’s probably gonna be some weird dead spaces for shows and movies coming up, but with everybody throwing themselves back into work, it doesn’t look like they’ll last too long.

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h/t Newsweek