Well-known Tolkienite Stephen Colbert has booked himself a dream trip, from the Ed Sullivan Theater to the Shire.
Timed to Tolkien Reading Day aka March 25, the host of CBS’ terminal Late Show joined filmmaker Peter Jackson on a video call to announce that they are collaborating on a new Lord of the Rings movie, tentatively subtitled Shadow of the Past.
Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo—and on track to follow director/franchise vet Andy Serkis’ The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum (due in theaters Dec. 17, 2027)—the film will follow Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. “Meanwhile,” the official synopsis continues, “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.”
Colbert will co-write the film with franchise vet Philippa Boyens and his son, Peter McGee.
“Yeah, I’m pretty happy about it,” Colbert grinned at the top of his call with Jackson (seen below).
Recounting the path that led him to this tailor-made project, Colbert said to Jackson, “You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me. But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [The Fellowship of the Ring] that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day.
“It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs,’” he noted, “And I thought, ‘Oh, wait — maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
From there, “I started talking it over with my son Peter, who’s also a screenwriter, and we worked out what we thought would work, especially as a framing device for that story,” Colbert shared. “It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago, I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it, and ever since then, the two of us have been working with the brilliant Philippa Boyens on how to develop this story.”
Production houses New Line and Warner Bros. Pictures, in turn, “loved it,” Colbert happily reported.
When Jackson raised the question of the Late Show host having the bandwidth for this gig, Colbert quipped, “I did not think I would have the time… but it turned out I’m going to be free, starting this summer”—after his CBS talker fades to black May 21.
Colbert’s previous associations with the live-action LOTR realm include the small role of a Laketown spy in 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and directing Jackson plus franchise stars Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen in 2019’s Darrylgorn, a short film he also wrote.
Now that Warner Brothers has been gobble up by Paramount/Skydance, we will see if this happens.
Cute, but April Fool’s is next week.
YOU, Mucky Boy!