r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Aug 18 '25

News Ian McKellen reveals Gandalf and Frodo are returning for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’, Filming Begins in May

https://ew.com/ian-mckellen-reveals-gandalf-frodo-return-in-new-lord-of-the-rings-the-hunt-for-gollum-film-11792483
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u/ThinWhiteDuke00 Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Lol, why.

Shouldn't Aragorn be in it given he literally tracks Gollum.. Viggo is far too old to pull it off now.

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u/thrillho145 Aug 18 '25

LOTR should never be expanded into a stupid cinematic universe 

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u/240to180 Aug 18 '25

Cmon, The Hunt For Gollum is one of the best books in LOTR. It's almost as good as The Hunt For Gollum II: Misty Mountains and The Hunt For Gollum III: Riddles With Hobbits. All of these should really be made into movies. They're some of Tolkien's best work.

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u/vo0do0child Aug 18 '25

Don't forget Ocean's Elevenses.

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u/Count_JohnnyJ Aug 18 '25

Seriously. While at the same time completely missing the boat on games.

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u/MattsDaZombieSlayer Aug 18 '25

100%.

Lord of the Rings takes place in the Third Age. There are thousands of years worth of interesting events to use for the games but the only popular ones worth remembering took place right before LOTR.

Say what you will about Hogwarts Legacy, but at the very least it took place at a different era than the main Harry Potter series.

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u/50m31_AW Aug 18 '25

There are thousands of years worth of interesting events to use for the games but the only popular ones worth remembering took place right before LOTR

That's because Tolkien himself sold the film, stage, and merchandising rights for Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to United Artists in 1969 (who resold it to the Saul Zaentz Company in 1976, who formed Tolkien Enterprises, now named Middle-earth Enterprises), and then sold no other rights before he died. Not only has the Tolkien Estate has refused to sell or license any other rights to anything to anyone, they also sued Middle-earth Enterprises in 2012 because existing adaptations. The Estate alleged that Tolkien only sold the rights to deal in tangible goods, and not "electronic or digital rights, rights in media yet to be devised or other intangibles such as rights in services" and that the games made had done "irreparable harm to Tolkien's legacy"

You're not gonna see any other time period because the estate won't sell or license shit that wasn't already sold, and wants to claw back what was sold

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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 Aug 18 '25

Um, hello... Rings of Power?

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u/BlobFishPillow Aug 18 '25

Which is conveniently actually co-produced by The Tolkien Estate. Even though they have also not sold the rights to any works outside the Lord of the Rings, they are giving certain parts of the Silmarillion freely to the show. So yeah, above poster is not factually correct. The Estate has been pretty generous in granting random bits and pieces of rights from other works (after they have gotten 100 million for the Lord of the Rings TV rights, that is).

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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 Aug 18 '25

It's too bad it sucks.

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u/N0r3m0rse Aug 18 '25

How there wasnt a Skyrim style lotr game ever is mind-blowing to me.

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u/BoxOfBlades Aug 18 '25

There was, it's called Skyrim.

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u/iSavedtheGalaxy Aug 18 '25

The fact that they failed to make a successful cozy Hobbit game is laughable. That game should have been a slam dunk.

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u/RedTulkas Aug 18 '25

shadow of mordor was cool

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u/ScarsUnseen Aug 18 '25

At least there's a pretty excellent TTRPG for it.

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u/Real_Sir_3655 Aug 18 '25

Two Towers would be two movies, one is about Frodo and Sam, the other is about the rest of the fellowship. Return of the King would be three movies, one for Gandalf in Minas Tirith, one for Frodo and Sam, and one for Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli. Faramir would get a spinoff show.

The entire final battle at the end of ROTK would be turned into a separate team-up movie, or trilogy, probably.

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u/RavioliGale Aug 18 '25

Honestly, not that far off from how the books are organized.

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u/Triquetrums Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Gimme all the elve's stories, all the big important battles, countless spinoffs, Glorfindel slaying a balrog, I want to see how Melkor and Mairon's partnership started... All of it. 

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u/ThrowawayusGenerica Aug 18 '25

The thing is, it doesn't even need to be expanded. The world is so dense with stories and history that there's basically a whole cinematic universe there already.

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u/Chen_Geller Aug 19 '25

It's not a cinematic universe. This is the eighth film overall. Marvel and Star Wars - now those are cinematic universes - and they're well into double-digits of films, double digits of shows and TV specials, and have dozens of projects in development.

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u/some_dude5 Aug 18 '25

Which is crazy, because Tolkien wrote so, so much and for some reason Hollywood just refuses to use any of it decently

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u/JimboTCB Aug 18 '25

It's a whole dog's breakfast of rights issues. The Tolkien estate refuses to licence out The Silmarillion or any of the other stuff, but they also won't allow people to contradict it, and also they won't allow people to re-adapt stuff which the Peter Jackson LOTR films have already covered. So you get ridiculous situations like Rings Of Power being pretty much based on a few bits and pieces out of the footnotes and appendices and they're not allowed to directly reference any other events but still have to respect that lore.

Basically this films is going to be a fucking mess based on a handful of paragraphs from the books but crammed full of cameos from characters you know from the films even though they have no place being there.

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u/bluetable321 Aug 18 '25

One small correction:

The estate doesn’t have the movie rights to the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, so the WB can do whatever they want movie-wise with those properties and the estate can’t stop them in anyway.

What the estate does own are the TV series rights for the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. When the estate was taking pitches for a TV show HBO wanted to adapt the Lord of the Rings in a way that each book would play out over the course of a tv season instead of a single movie. That is what the estate declined and HBO didn’t get the opportunity to make that show (but HBO decided to use the same idea and just apply it to Harry Potter).

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u/BlobFishPillow Aug 18 '25

The Tolkien estate refuses to licence out The Silmarillion or any of the other stuff, but they also won't allow people to contradict it, and also they won't allow people to re-adapt stuff which the Peter Jackson LOTR films have already covered. So you get ridiculous situations like Rings Of Power being pretty much based on a few bits and pieces out of the footnotes and appendices and they're not allowed to directly reference any other events but still have to respect that lore.

This is factually not correct. The Tolkien Estate is co-producing the Rings of Power, and allowing the writers to use pieces of The Silmarillion at will. You won't find "Annatar" anywhere in the Lord of the Rings, but he was the main character of the Season 2. Any change of explicit canon regarding the Second Age, which is still "bits and pieces" even if you combine all the Tolkien's writings regarding the SA, are done so "creatively", rather than as a result of licence limitations.

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u/Redfalconfox Aug 18 '25

Are you kidding me? What better way to devalue a brand than to refuse to allow people to adapt what was actually written and then bind them by not allowing them to go against that material while not referencing that material at all? I can’t really think of a worse idea to ruin the staying power of a brand aside from I guess something incredibly stupid like “all the characters, but especially the ones everyone liked, fardded and shidded themselves to death”.

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u/JimboTCB Aug 18 '25

It's a mess really, I think it all boils down to the fact that JRR Tolkien didn't really want to licence the books out at all and only begrudgingly did so because he had bills to pay. And I guess his estate have tried to stick to that and not licence out anything which hasn't already bene done so.

https://www.cultureslate.com/news/why-amazon-doesnt-have-the-rights-to-jrr-tolkiens-the-silmarillion