I Love ‘Lord of the Rings.’ But I Beg you, Stop With the Spinoffs
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, my favorite film property, is slowly morphing into yet another cursèd cinematic universe that will haunt me with new installments of diminishing quality until the day I die. I mean, seriously, who in Galadriel’s name actually wants a whole new set of movies built around Gollum?!
The tragic news hit Middle Earth on Thursday: According to Variety, Warner Bros.—which is apparently intent on milking this beloved franchise until it is drier than Frodo’s skin at the end of Return of the King—is now working on a new batch of films built around Andy Serkis’s shifty-eyed character. The first is set to premiere in 2026. In the words of Smeagol himself, “AAAAGH! ... You ruins it!”
The working title for the first of these films is Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is actually pretty funny because a 2009 fan film already adapted this book lore with the exact same title. (Gollum was also the subject of a terrible video game last year, so it seems we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.) Serkis will both direct and star, according to Variety, and he’ll also executive produce alongside Ken Kamins and The Imaginarium’s Jonathan Cavendish.