The Hunt for Gollum WON'T be 2 movies, but there is another new Lord of the Rings film in the works

The Lord of the Rings seems everywhere these days. Amazon Prime Video have their big expensive series The Rings of Power, which wrapped up its second season the other month. And this December, we're getting an animated movie called The War of the Rohirrim, all about the horse-riding people of Rohan.

And that's just the start. We also know that Andy Serkis, who played the ring-whipped monster Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, will return to star in and direct a new film called The Hunt for Gollum. “It’s quite an intense story, which falls after the birthday party of Bilbo and before the Mines Of Moria,” screenwriter Philippa Boyens explained to Empire. “It’s a specific chunk of incredible untold story, told through the perspective of this incredible creature.”

In The Lord of the Rings lore according to author J.R.R. Tolkien, the ranger Aragorn and the wizard Gandalf team up to track down Gollum, who is closely tied to the One Ring, during this period. This has led to speculation that Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen, who played those characters in the original trilogy, might return. Both of them seem open to the idea, although McKellen has cautioned that they'd need to get a move on given his 85 years.

McKellen also shared publicly that, according to what he heard, The Hunt for Gollum was going to be "two films." But according to Boyens, that was just a mixup. “I can tell you definitively it isn’t two films!” she said. “That was a genuine misunderstanding that happened because we’ve begun to work, conceptually, on two different live-action films. The first beingThe Hunt For Gollum, the second one still to be confirmed.”

So The Hunt for Gollum isn't going to be two films long, which is probably for the best; I still remember when they tried to adapt The Hobbit, a relatively short book, into three films, and I can't say I want to sit through something that bloated again.

As for why McKellen may have gotten his wires crossed, apparently whatever second film they're considering would also involve Gandalf. So he might be in two more Lord of the Rings films, time and spirit permitting, but The Hunt for Gollum will be a standalone film. “We’re playing around with a number of ideas, but most of those ideas do include Gandalf,” Boyens said. “So Gandalf would potentially return for two live-action films.”

It's also possible they would recast McKellen, even though he doesn't "like the idea of anybody else playing Gandalf." As for what this second film could be about, who knows? Gandalf has a long history. He was originally a divine being known as Olórin sent to Middle-earth from the uttermost west to contest the power of Sauron, and probably had a lot of adventures between then and when he boards a ship back to Valinor at the end of the original trilogy. The Rings of Power has taken to inventing new Gandalf stories out of whole cloth, so there's no telling where a new movie might take him.

Closer in time, The War of the Rohirrim is coming out on December 13. If that does well, we might get another movie made in that style. “We have an absolute banger of a second film that would just be incredible as an anime,” Boyens said. “But let’s see if there’s an appetite for it.”

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