There are some news stories that, as soon as you’ve clocked them, lead to a frantic bout of mental calendar checking – because it’s almost impossible to accept that they could be real unless it’s 1 April. “The Hunt for Gollum: Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis to work on new Lord of the Rings film” is most definitely one of these.
What on Middle-earth is going on here? We’ve known for some time now that Hollywood is primed and ready to re-plunder JRR Tolkien’s beloved high-fantasy tomes, ever since Warner Bros announced a deal to make multiple new movies based on the books in February last year. The first of these will be the animated venture The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which is set 200 years before the events of The Hobbit – because it is being delivered in an alternative format (and doesn’t retread events we’ve already seen on screen) feels like a reasonably intriguing addition to the canon. There’s also Amazon’s TV show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an entirely unnecessary prequel to the film trilogy, which I nonetheless devoured like a warg that’s not eaten any fantasy homunculi for at least three weeks. By the end of the first season, I had absolutely no idea who any of these people were (except perhaps Galadriel), but the whole thing was so deliciously Tolkien-y that none of this seemed to matter.
