The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King will be back in North American cinemas next month, to celebrate 20 years since Peter Jackson first debuted his Oscar-winning film. Its return to the multiplexes comes at a time when we seem to have more JRR Tolkien-inspired fantasies to choose from than a 1980s branch of Games Workshop. As well as Gollum and co returning to the big screen, we have the baffling, utterly superfluous yet sumptuously filmed and geekily delightful small screen The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show. Then next year there will be The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated venture with Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand and Jackson alumnus Miranda Otto as Eowyn (who will take the narrator’s role for the forthcoming prequel about the legendary warrior king of Rohan).
We are also promised several new live-action movies based on Tolkien’s Middle-earth, after a deal struck by rights holder Embracer Group and studios Warner Bros and New Line. Jackson and his two closest Lord of the Rings collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have said they are being kept in the loop “every step of the way” about the new films.
