Stephen Colbert is heading to Middle Earth.
The Late Show host has been announced as a co-writer for a new live action Lord Of The Rings film to be produced by Peter Jackson. Colbert, who came up with the idea for the film’s story, will be working alongside Lord Of The Rings franchise veteran Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. The project currently has a working title of The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.
The announcement was made in an Instagram post, below.
The official studio synopsis for the film is as follows –
Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, 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.
In the announcement, Colbert described how he first developed the idea for the story –
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 chapters ‘Three Is Company’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-downs,’ 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?”
And 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. 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.
Judging from the offical summary and the comments made by Colbert, we can perhaps infer a few things about the project. Since it is set after “the passing of Frodo” – presumably meaning after he has sailed into the West towards Valinor as seen at the end of Return Of The King – it is safe to assume that the film will take place at some point in the beginning of the Fourth Age. In Appendix B of The Return Of The King, Tolkien notes that early in the Fourth Age, Aragorn, now known as King Elessar, returns to the boarders of The Shire to visit with Samwise, Pippin and Merry, along with Sam’s oldest daughter Elanor –
King Elessar rides north, and dwells for a while by Lake Evendim. He comes to the Brandywine Bridge, and there greets his friends. He gives the Star of the Du’nedain to Master Samwise, and Elanor is made a maid of honour to Queen Arwen.
The early chapters that Colbert refers to detail the start of the journey Frodo and friends take on their way out of the Shire to Rivendale. This was material skipped over in the film adaptation mainly in order to streamline the narrative and to get the four hobbits to the town of Bree for their meeting with Aragorn that much faster. It does include an encounter with the fan favorite character, the mysterious Tom Bombadil. It is possible that these chapters will be told in flashback as the older Sam, Pippin and Merry make their way towards Brandywine Bridge and their meeting with King Elessar.
Although he comes from the world of comedy, Colbert is not as an odd a choice as one might think. He has long professed himself as a Tolkien fan to the point where he had a cameo in Jackson’s 2013 The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug and frequently quizzed actors from the film on various points of Middle Earth trivia.
Currently, Jackson and company are prepping The Lord Of The Rings: The Hunt For Gollum to start shooting later this year for a December 2027 release. This film is set between The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings stories and will flesh out incidents mentioned in Lord Of The Rings concerning Gollum, the twisted creature who possessed the evil One Ring before it fell into Bilbo’s possession. The film will be directed by Andy Serkis, who has portrayed Gollum throughout the film franchise.
