My Precious Franchise is Back in 2026
It’s time to take a trip west from Valinor to Middle Earth. Arguably one of the greatest franchises of all time is coming back to live action on the big screen. Early Thursday morning on May 9th Warner Brothers announced that The Lord of the Rings would have new movies coming out with a targeted 2026 release year.
New content from this world is not something that happens very often. There will be no more books written considering J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, and it takes a lot of time and money to create something as epic as The Lord of the Rings.
The first movie of the new batch of movies has a working title of The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. As of now, not much is known about it expect that Andy Serkis, who stared in the trilogy in the earl 2000s, will return to do the motion capture, be the voice of Gollum, and direct the movie, while Peter Jackson and his longtime writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens will be involved in every step along the way. This does come as a nice surprise as many thought that Jackson, who directed The Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001-2003 and The Hobbit trilogy from 2012-2014, would be involved in the Amazon series The Rings of Power which was released in 2022.
I have a lot to say about a lot of this and Amazon’s involvement in the franchise in general. Starting off, I could not be more thrilled to learn that Andy Serkis is coming back to do the motion capture and voice of Gollum. To me, Serkis is the greatest of all time when it comes to motion capture. He plays two of the most recognizable characters that involve motion capture in Gollum and Caesar from the Planet of the Apes trilogy from 2011-2017. Now, Serkis directing the movie is another thing. Actors can direct and it can turn out well, just look at Ben Affleck or John Krasinski, but Serkis hasn’t had a lot of success when it comes to directing. His most recent directing credit is from Venom: Let There Be Carnage in 2021, and it’s an understatement to say that it was a bad movie. It currently has a 5.9/10 on IMDb and a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.
With the movie being titled The Hunt for Gollum, I have a pretty simple guess as to what this movie will be about. In the first book of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn, heir of Isildur and rightful king of Gondor, is tasked to hunt down Gollum and question him about the Ring of Power. I am hoping this is the general storyline for the movie as there was a report back in February of 2023 saying that the new movies from this franchise would focus on heroes of the third age of Middle Earth. Assuming this ends up happening, Aragorn could be a lead character of the first of the new movie, despite not being the title character.
The next great thing about this is that Peter Jackson is back in what seems to be a producer type role in this movie. Jackson is beloved by all fans of The Lord of the Rings because of his work on the main trilogy, even if The Hobbit trilogy did not pan out as expected. Fans were also disappointed to learn that he was not involved in the Amazon series, The Rings of Power as that focused on the second age of Middle Earth. There were mixed reviews to this show, but Jackson was seemingly annoyed that fans thought he would be involved at all.
The series on Amazon is where everything gets confusing. Amazon is currently making seasons 2-5 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power which I have briefly touched on earlier, but despite making it the most expensive TV show ever made with the first season alone costing more than 500 million dollars, it came with very, very mixed reviews. Fans say it was inaccurate to the lore (which may be true but I haven’t gotten that far in the books) and they seemed to complain about everything surrounding it.
Regardless of reviews, Amazon is reportedly looking to expand their current universe of Middle Earth. This is where it can get confusing because does two different universes set in the same world make much sense? This debate happened not too long ago with DC when they cast Robert Pattinson to play Batman in the 2022 movie, The Batman. At the time of the casting, Ben Affleck was playing the DCEU’s version of the Dark Knight. Even though Affleck is no longer playing the character and Pattinson’s own movie had significantly higher ratings, it was a time of confusion and doubt.
The Hollywood Reporter points out that the two different universes could lead to some good competition, but I feel it will just be a one sided affair. No matter what, there will be loyalists to Peter Jackson who believe he can do no wrong and they will go and review-bomb whatever Amazon puts out. Now Jackson’s productions are almost a guarantee to be better, but there is not a chance that Amazon throws away their own version of Middle Earth with how much they have already spent.
Overall, The Lord of the Rings is back, and I could not be more excited. Andy Serkis returning is definitely the highlight for me, but I always want to be cautiously optimistic. I will always hope for the best, but I know that there is a lot, and I mean a lot, that can go wrong.
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