The story will pick up 14 years after the end of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Frodo may have gone to the Undying Lands, but the other Hobbits, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, all remain, and the film will find them looking back on their past. That will then serve as a framing device to tell a story set during The Fellowship of the Ring, with chapters 3-8 of the book being adapted, having largely been omitted from the first Lord of the Rings movie.
The Lord Of The Rings Franchise Is Stuck In The Past
This choice for the next Lord of the Rings movie after The Hunt for Gollum isn’t just a surprising one, but a frustrating one, too. That’s because it essentially doubles down on the same core problem as that movie, which is that it means the franchise remains trapped within the confines of Peter Jackson’s original trilogy. Each film is focused on the main characters from those movies, whose stories were not only perfectly told, but had perfect endings.
Do we really need to see the likes of Frodo and Sam again? Hopefully, the movies will do something interesting, but it’s hard to argue for it right now. It also puts it in a difficult spot with casting: presumably, Shadow of the Past will bring back Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd for the post-ROTK scenes, but also likely for the ones set during Fellowship as well.
Perhaps most remarkable with all of this is that the two movies are both set during The Fellowship of the Ring; they’re stories within stories. This not only makes what it’s covering feel rather thin for feature-length movies, but comes with an even more inherent risk of not living up to the masterpieces that came before, because given when they’re set, they should feel like seamless parts of those movies – and that’s going to be extremely difficult to pull off.
Even before these two movies, the franchise has struggled to move on. The Hobbit trilogy a commercial success, but otherwise a disaster of a trilogy, and the saga seemingly (and fairly) was done after that. It returned with Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, which has also proved divisive and, again, is still focusing on some of the original trilogy’s core characters. The likes of Galadriel, Gandalf, and Sauron are all crucial to the story, when the timeline could’ve allowed for something very different. War of the Rohirrim was more distant in terms of its characters, but was still a prequel about a core part of the main trilogy (Helm’s Deep), and also didn’t work.
Part of this is the studios being held back by rights, since they don’t have access to everything Tolkien wrote (The Silmarillion, for instance, is off limits). But even with that, there could be better stories that shift the focus onto other parts of Middle-earth, and aren’t so reliant on nostalgia for those first three movies. Right now, it feels similar to where Star Wars has been for most of this decade, constantly relying on fan service rather than doing something that’s fresh (though it is starting to shift beyond that with things like Starfighter).
This has already led to diminishing returns with LOTR: there are three incredible movies, and then everything else since has disappointed. It’d be amazing for that to be turned around, and there is talent involved in these projects, but it’d be much more exciting if this were something brand-new, rather than going back to Fellowship again.
The Hunt for Gollum will be released on December 17th, 2027. Shadow of the Past does not yet have a release date.
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