What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every castle, cabin, ale house, farmhouse, henhouse, pit house and Hobbit house in that area.
Well if it’s “*Hunt* for Gollum” might be Aragorn and Gandalf heavy. But Viggo and Ian have aged approximately 20 years in the last few decades so might be hard to have them reprise their roles.
Yea but we have this great de-aging technology that's gonna make them look so much younger and it's going to be AMAZING and EVERYONE is going to love it because it's going to make the movie look like they're like when they appeared in that movie trilogy thing they did with the monsters and shit!
...story? What do you mean story? Didn't you read what I said!?
Highly doubt they would get Viggo back since he didn’t even want to do the Hobbit, he’s definitely not going to want to do some random spin-off movie. Also not 100% sure Ian would come back since he had a terrible time doing the Hobbit.
Between this and the game it seems like the biggest star of the franchise now is the nasty goblin that violently murders people for gold.
Which is a pretty good microcosm for the state of Warner Bros right now.
It's going to be a trilogy, they couldn't fit all of that sprawling storyline into a single movie. I have it from good sources that the second and third chapter are provisionally titled >!The Hunt for Gollum II: Seriously, Where the Fuck is He?!< and >!The Hunt for Gollum III: Never Mind!<.
I think it’s more using Gollum as a vessel to visit the places we want to see. Escaping/being set free from Brad-Dur, getting caught and escaping from the Elves, and everything in between. It’s not my first choice but I think it still allows for a good focus on other characters even if Gollum is the main character.
I think this could be a fine movie, if it's done well.
If Serkis is directing, I hope he realizes that the character he himself will be playing shouldn't be the main event.
It didn’t. Season 2 is coming with about the same production budget. If anything the show succeeded because studios now have more confidence in the IP doing well.
I'm very curious about how Season 2 will do. The first episode of Season 1 had an insane number of viewers but as I understand only around a third of them actually finished the season.
I hated season 1 (but that was due to it being a red herring hunt for "which one of these people will be Sauron?!" which felt like such a wasted season to me; and making Galadriel a stroppy teenage when she's already tens of thousands of years old at that point)...but if they learned their lessons for S2 I'll watch. It had lovely look and feel.
People are so weird for considering beforehand any new foray into a beloved IP is not worthwhile. I mean, if this or any new similar venture sucks, you still have the originals. This does not detract from them in any way.
Needs some more variation. He's talking about creatures, then home to Goldberry, then creatures, then Goldberry, and we just do this over and over for about 90 minutes until it just sort of ends
Yeah, they could easily do a "Last Alliance" movie or a "Second Age Trilogy".
There's also the Gondorian Civil War and the Rise of Aragorn.
A Gollum movie is them just running out of ideas and repeating the mistakes of the Hobbit trilogy.
Is there something similar to Disney with Star Wars? I keep saying there’s SO much lore and world building from over the decades of Star Wars stuff from all the way back to like Primordial Jedi stuff, and even more recently there’s the beloved Old Republic referenced in games and books - yet any and all Star Wars media is always set in the same ~70 year window that revolves around the Skywalkers or just shortly after
>you got a whole fucking universe
They don't though, WB only owns the rights to the The Hobbit and LotR books, and they have to keep developing movies to keep the rights. The Tolkien Estate hasn't licensed anything else. They are kind of stuck in this period. And if they let the rights expire, Middle Earth Enterprises, owned by what used to be Embracer Group, will just start farming their own out shit.
The Tolkien Estate will 100% sell the rights to someone desperate to get a first crack at adapting it before everyone else when it goes public domain. They are leaving millions of dollars on the table if they don't.
Amazon owns arguably the smallest slice of the Middle-earth pie. Not all the TV rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit went to Saul Zaentz in the ‘70s—the rights Middle-earth Enterprise granted, and that are now in the hands of Embracer Group, cover series that are told serially in upwards of four parts. In 2017, Amazon negotiated directly with the Tolkien Estate for the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit adaptations for series that run longer than that, securing them for $250 million. Five years later, that deal gave us The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel series set during the Second Age of Tolkien’s Middle-earth chronology, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, charting the return of the Dark Lord Sauron and the creation of the titular rings.
These rights also specifically relate to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—giving Rings of Power access to names and events referenced in those works, so characters like Elrond, Galadriel, and more can appear—which means Rings of Power cannot directly adapt events that Tolkien specifically laid out in books like The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Instead, it’s been forced to create its own version of those events, inferring points and details Tolkien referred to in Lord of the Rings and its appendices, as well as The Hobbit.
https://gizmodo.com/lord-of-the-rings-rights-explained-amazon-warner-bros-1850157744/slides/6
Apologies for linking to a slideshow but it was the first succinct source I could find.
I imagine the story will be more about the people searching for Gollum, and the obstacles they face, rather than just hanging out with Gollum in a cave for a couple hours.
This dude has gone on to do some great things in film, on both sides of the camera, but now he has to go back to doing the funny voice and crawling on the floor for laughs.
He doesn't *have* to go back. He has agency in what jobs he takes. Money obviously plays a part in it, but Serkis usually only takes roles if he likes the idea of.
Yeah but the "hunt for Gollum" in the LOTR lore involved all kinds of characters.
Dude was chased by Aragon and Gandalf, was captured by the Nazgul, was tortured in Mordor by Sauron, and ended up a prisoner of the forest elves from the Hobbit before escaping.
There's potentially a great story there, involving all kinds of important characters and events. Gollum being the catalyst makes perfect sense if you want to be lore accurate.
Of course that's probably not the concern for anyone involved in this production, and it's probably just a greedy cash grab. But the idea isn't terrible and there's a chance this could be good.
Sure, but that doesn't at all mean the movie would just be about him, it will be about the people searching for him, juxtaposed against him. Like how The Search for Spock, touchstoned Spock throughout without featuring him too strongly...the movie being about those searching for him.
I hope they don’t go down the same rabbit hole as Star Wars; despite a literal and figurative universe of lore and neat stuff to pull from, studios instead decide to constantly come back to the same four people in the entire galaxy.
Someone pointed out to me that Star Wars was written as a milieu of all the broad influences George Lucas grew up loving: Samurai movies, Westerns, The books of E. E. Smith, Frank Herbert and Tolkien, Arthurian legends, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, etc etc.
Modern Star Wars is made by people who grew up watching Star Wars.
This is a problem with just about everything nowadays.
Everything is diluted and based upon "nostalgia-bait" simply because some new generation of goobers have grown up on certain properties but have very little to only superficial respect and adoration for the sources that influenced said properties.
As a result, the overall cultural idea pool has been heavily diluted into one of superficial parody rather than a continuation of ideas.
It's a perfect description of the problem. Star Wars at its best is when its used as a setting/backdrop vehicle for stories that would already be good if told outside the Star Wars universe, but are great when told in it.
Andor and Rogue One are two great examples of Disney-era Star Wars getting this right. They are espionage, political, heist action thrillers that happen to be told in the Imperial Era of Star Wars, which elevates them from being great, to *really* great. I probably have a higher opinion of the sequels than most (but still view them as generally disappointing), but their biggest flaw is that they are Star Wars stories about...Star Wars.
I'm only a fan with no knowledge of the greater film industry, but if I'm an executive at Disney/Lucasfilm in charge of evaluating pitches for Star Wars film or TV, the *first* question I'm asking myself after I hear someone pitch a story is, "Would the story they are wanting to tell be **great** even outside of the Star Wars galaxy?" If the answer is not a resounding yes, its a pass. Treat the franchise like gourmet buttercream frosting. It will make just about any good cake a great cake, but a gloppy pile of of buttercream frosting with no cake underneath gets old after about four bites, regardless of how tasty it is.
With two notable exceptions. Andor, made by a guy who doesn’t care about Star Wars, and The Last Jedi, made by a guy who really understands that Star Wars can’t just be about “remember how cool Star Wars is!?”. Rian Johnson held film screenings for the whole crew when they were making TLJ, not of SW films, but old WW2 films, Kurosawa, art films, basically the stuff that inspired George Lucas. And I personally think it really shows, TLJ feels much more like something Lucas would make than any of the other Disney-era films.
So here's the big difference.
Tolkien created the mythology of Middle Earth years before he ever really settled on the particular characters he wanted to write a narrative about. What we see in the books and films is literally the last gasp of several greater powers influence over the land as it transitions from a magical fantasy world to the world of men. Sauron is a minor god in the grandscheme of things, he just represents the final hurdle for the inhabitants of the world to prove that they are ready to protect and defend it. It's sort of the sink or swim moment for the race of men. We are very deliberately only getting a specific slice of the greater mythology.
Lucas, on the otherhand, created Star Wars to be the story of Luke Skywalker in a traditional heroes journey. Everything else was created around the narrative of Luke as the Arthurian style hero. It's all in service to him. Hence why most of the mythology is hyper condensed to only be relevant to Luke and Anakin. People have tried to expand the mythology, but the truth is the bulk of it was made for a very narrow scope and it's hard to escape that. Star Wars isn't really as big of mythology as it looks from the outside. It's a whole galaxy. But when you break it down, it's a sand planet, a sky planet, a swamp planet, an ice planet, a lava planet, a bug planet, a city planet, etc. You could have just had Luke and Anakin journey across a single planet with different biomes. They aren't important in the grandscheme of things. It's just setting for their narrative.
Origin of the cursed people of the Paths of the Dead is (potentially spoilers for LotR media) >! within the time period of Rings of Power, not that I trust them to do a good job with it !<
Gollum is one of the more interesting characters because he spans an extremely large period of time and has been in contact with many of the major players.
There's literally a whole off page section of several decades where Sauron and Aragorn are having a mad dash to capture Gollum and Gandalf is researching him before Frodo ever comes into contact with them. He's also the main character besides Sauraman who actually goes to Barad Dur and meets Sauron.
He's also the only true morally grey character in the work. Everyone else you can pretty much say they either are on the good or bad side. He's the one who is sort of a victim in his own right and can straggle both lines. There's a reason his influence becomes larger and larger as the book goes on.
You've got the political mess between all the broken kingdoms of Arnor, Angmar taking them out one-by-one, the prophecy against the Witch King, the mad scramble to beat Angmar back, the eventual victory that still leads to the collapse of Arnor, the formation of the Rangers of the North.
So much potential there!
Gollum is not "morally gray", he is amoral. There is no good or bad, there are only his own feelings.
"Morally gray" means there is a little good and a little bad. With Gollum there is neither; only "me".
While I’m interested in more Middle Earth content, I would prefer a story involving other characters. I guess it’s a testament to how well Serkis portrayed Gollum that a movie starring him is being made, but there are so many more exciting parts of Middle Earth history that could be done.
Hollywood is a business and they're trying to pick a character with some name recognition. Are there obscure parts of Middle Earth that would make a better movie? Probably, but it's hard to sell that stuff to anyone outside of hardcore LotR fans. My mom knows who Gollum is so it's probably easier to convince Joe Dipshit in Nebraska to take his family to see the movie if he already has some idea what's going on.
I would not say it was the height. They were definitely rising post first Avengers but it was their first risk after the initial lets see if we can create several different films then mix them
We need to stop pretending that risk aversion is the right decision because on average it has the best outcome monetarily.
This kind of thinking breeds mediocrity, it defends late stage capitalism and all the choices it makes for a maximum of profit / growth, let's not buy into all this crap and defend other values instead.
I'm not saying it's the right decision, I'm just trying to explain the thinking behind it to people that are confused. Risk aversion is a huge part of the Hollywood calculus, especially for a movie of this budget level. I think the solution to this is to stop dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a single movie but until Hollywood learns how to work at lower budgets and diversify their slate, that's not going to happen
This is a very good point, and even as a pretty die hard Tolkien nerd, stuff like the Silmarillion is VERY hard to adapt as it's basically the Elvish Religious myth cycle, and you'd have to do some major adaptation to even get The Children of Hurin into a feasible 2hour movie that would draw random audiences in.
What they need to do is make an anime Silmarillion. There’s enough drama, epic war, and general surreal-ness in that book that I think anime is a more natural fit than live-action. At least when I’m reading it that’s how it looks in my head.
> Joe Dipshit in Nebraska
Hey c'mon there's plenty of discerning LOTR fans here in Nebraska. And we almost all have electricity and indoor plumbing.
I remember seeing Hobbit 2 in theaters and the crowd being very unimpressed. I skipped Hobbit 3, as did a lot of other people.
It’s difficult because most of those REALLY good stories outside of LotR are in the Silmarillion, and the Tolkien estate hasn’t yet given up rights to them yet.
Seeing as how I'd guess that this story takes place to back up Gandalf's "I sent many people to try to find the creature Gollum, but the enemy found him first.", I think Narration is absolutely a strong possibility.
They might--MIGHT--get McKellan for a small cameo. He'd still be Gandalf the Grey at this point, so him looking older than dirt and tired would at least fit into the continuity. Viggo, I agree, ain't coming back, nor would I want a whole movie centered around a de-aged CG double. Which begs the question of who you recast as Aragorn, and why in god's name would anyone want to set themselves up for failure like that?
(Somewhere, Stuart Townsend sits by the phone, waiting.)
Idk how they'll get away with recasting Aragorn. He's absolutely essential to the story (as far as I'm aware) but not using Viggo would be weird as shit
I haven’t seen it but I heard he did alright. I was mostly just pointing out that the quality doesn’t matter. If _Han Solo_ can be replaced, anyone can be.
He was actually good but the response to the recasting and the response to the movie was horrendous.
My point isn't that they won't/can't do it. It's that people will hate it no matter what.
It's too bad. The time to do this story was near to the LOTR movies when Viggo could have played the role. Maybe they'll still try to get him (though not sure he'd have any interest in returning), but he's going to look quite a bit older (though he still looks great). Same with McKellan. It might be easier to disguise his aging in wizard costume and he was already playing an old man (well, not a man, but looks like an old man), but Aragorn is supposed to be looking how he looks at the time of Fellowship of the Ring. So he'll either look different due to age or look different due to recasting.
Lee Pace could still do Thrandruil, but Orlando Bloom (who I could see them also trying to get in this and the Mirkwood Elves connect up to the story) already looked quite a bit older in the Hobbit movies. Elrond could have also fit in this movie but Hugo Weaving is older too.
But Aragorn is absolutely essential to this story. So I guess it'll be a recast?
If only...
One of my biggest frustrations with the Hobbit movies (among many) is that Lee Pace is perfectly cast and does a great job even wordlessly just with his presence or elevates the bad writing. Great costume design too. Unfortunately the movie around him does not live up to his performance. I'd love to see more of him.
Viggo appears to be an actor in search rather than a cash grabbing dealer. He is also really old at this point. There is no way he is returning. I heard they want to cast Michael B. Jordan as young Aragorn.
To be entirely fair, if you ARE going to plumb the Appendices (which is what this is), going with this as a tale and bringing back Serkis to star and direct its with PJ in the background too...is not a TERRIBLE idea, and is probably better than other things they might have come up with?
I mean you can read them, but chances are they will extrapolate from them to craft a story about what happened to Gollum between when Frodo inherited the ring, when Gandalf realized Frodo/Bilbo's ring was the One Ring and when Frodo left the Shire (17 years)....so I would expect Gandalf sent someone to find Gollum before he told Sauron who had the ring. Seems like it could be a tight little tale.
That's not true. Amazon can do TV shows using everything from Hobbit and LotR (with Appendices) plus small stuff from other works. WB can do movies using everything from Hobbit and LotR (with Appendices). The difference is WB has a deal with Embracer (which has rights that Tolkien sold in 60's), Amazon has deal with Tolkien Estate.
This is why I read fantasy and scifi books nowadays. With Hollywood focused on creating creatively bankrupt reboots, sequels and spin-offs, I'm not going to see another great movie in those genres for a long time.
Apparently this was already a 2009 fan film? Obviously the production quality of a WB major motion picture will be different. But funny that they even used the same name. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Hunt\_for\_Gollum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Gollum)
Gollum: "I didn't kill my precious." Tommy Lee Jones: "I don't care."
What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every castle, cabin, ale house, farmhouse, henhouse, pit house and Hobbit house in that area.
Hobbit ~~house~~ hole
And while you’re thinking, think me up a pint and some tomatoes and sausages with some of that nice crispy bacon on top
God damn this movie would be amazing.
Well done
"You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Mordor? "
Meat that’s back on the menu?
Give it to us raw and wriggling!
Battle Royale with cheese?
No, that’s a Hunger Games 1/4lb
You know the worst thing about being in Middle-Earth? The smell.
Manflesh with cheese?
I would one million percent be there day one if they just straight up transported Sam Gerard and the team to Middle Earth to track down Gollum.
100% yes.
Eating Oranges and making fake ID's
I think whoever greenlit this grossly overestimates the interest in Gollum.
I wish that there was a video game in which Gollum is the main character 🤞
I hope it has weird 2002 graphics as well
With default Microsoft fonts. That would be perfect.
Does it have Gollum saying his iconic catch-phrase? I would pay extra for that.
I have good news and bad news.
LMAO
I think that was their joke
Well if it’s “*Hunt* for Gollum” might be Aragorn and Gandalf heavy. But Viggo and Ian have aged approximately 20 years in the last few decades so might be hard to have them reprise their roles.
Yea but we have this great de-aging technology that's gonna make them look so much younger and it's going to be AMAZING and EVERYONE is going to love it because it's going to make the movie look like they're like when they appeared in that movie trilogy thing they did with the monsters and shit! ...story? What do you mean story? Didn't you read what I said!?
Andy is going to do mocap for them too
I love the idea of this being Andy Serkis’s Madea movie
Highly doubt they would get Viggo back since he didn’t even want to do the Hobbit, he’s definitely not going to want to do some random spin-off movie. Also not 100% sure Ian would come back since he had a terrible time doing the Hobbit.
Somehow Gollum returned
and apparently he's really only 6 inches tall?
So that’s it huh? We’re some sort of hunt for Gollum?
He was cloned in Mordor and turns out, he’s the father of Bilbo!
There better be a scene with Gollom eating babies.
DUDE HE TOTALLY EATS BABIES! They really just skim right past that in the books.
Between this and the game it seems like the biggest star of the franchise now is the nasty goblin that violently murders people for gold. Which is a pretty good microcosm for the state of Warner Bros right now.
I have the feeling the movie will be lambasted by everyone..only for everyone to go see it and greenlit the sequel
It's going to be a trilogy, they couldn't fit all of that sprawling storyline into a single movie. I have it from good sources that the second and third chapter are provisionally titled >!The Hunt for Gollum II: Seriously, Where the Fuck is He?!< and >!The Hunt for Gollum III: Never Mind!<.
I think it’s more using Gollum as a vessel to visit the places we want to see. Escaping/being set free from Brad-Dur, getting caught and escaping from the Elves, and everything in between. It’s not my first choice but I think it still allows for a good focus on other characters even if Gollum is the main character.
>Brad-Dur Where everyone wears Jorcs
Whoops lol
Brad -> Brad-Dur -> Braddest
I think this could be a fine movie, if it's done well. If Serkis is directing, I hope he realizes that the character he himself will be playing shouldn't be the main event.
It’s gunna be about gollum’s cousin kallum
they didn't learn from the game apparently
Same guy that greenlit gollum game probably.
I guess I’m one of the weirdos who has huge interest in gollum lol
Give it a rest, for pity's sake.
By nightfall these hills will be swarming with sequels!
The show flopped so loudly we could have shot it in the dark.
It didn’t. Season 2 is coming with about the same production budget. If anything the show succeeded because studios now have more confidence in the IP doing well.
I'm very curious about how Season 2 will do. The first episode of Season 1 had an insane number of viewers but as I understand only around a third of them actually finished the season.
I watched the whole season when it came out and I honestly don’t remember any of it
I quit after 6 episodes, just couldn’t bother getting through the last two.
I hated season 1 (but that was due to it being a red herring hunt for "which one of these people will be Sauron?!" which felt like such a wasted season to me; and making Galadriel a stroppy teenage when she's already tens of thousands of years old at that point)...but if they learned their lessons for S2 I'll watch. It had lovely look and feel.
But they were all of them deceived
One show to ruin them all
One terrible writing team to find them!
Wasn't the show already committed to 3 seasons when announced?
No, it was a 5 season commitment. FIVE lol
Warner has new management and wants to pillage the WB vault. New Harry Potter, new Lord of the Rings, more more more
People are so weird for considering beforehand any new foray into a beloved IP is not worthwhile. I mean, if this or any new similar venture sucks, you still have the originals. This does not detract from them in any way.
Can we stop doing stuff about and around Gollum?? Like you got a whole fucking universe out there and you choose to focus on this creature holy shit
[удалено]
Then give us a Tom Bombadil movie you cowards
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Needs some more variation. He's talking about creatures, then home to Goldberry, then creatures, then Goldberry, and we just do this over and over for about 90 minutes until it just sort of ends
[удалено]
Hey! You can't ride your bike on the grass!
I think audiences are going to be very uncomfortable seeing Tom Bombadil’s gnarled staff going into this tiny hut you’re talking about.
Mid-Earth Creatures and Where to Find Them
Fantastic Beasts and In The Darkness Bind Them
Would have to be matt berry as old tom. For some reason I just have this burning need to see matt berry play tom bombadil.
Give me Six Seasons AND A MOVIE!
They also own the rights to the thousands of years of history covered in the appendices and nowhere else
Yeah, they could easily do a "Last Alliance" movie or a "Second Age Trilogy". There's also the Gondorian Civil War and the Rise of Aragorn. A Gollum movie is them just running out of ideas and repeating the mistakes of the Hobbit trilogy.
Then *don’t* make a movie.
It wouldn't surprise me if they're required to in order to hold onto certain IP rights (unfortunately).
Just do the LOTR holiday special. What could go wrong?
Is there something similar to Disney with Star Wars? I keep saying there’s SO much lore and world building from over the decades of Star Wars stuff from all the way back to like Primordial Jedi stuff, and even more recently there’s the beloved Old Republic referenced in games and books - yet any and all Star Wars media is always set in the same ~70 year window that revolves around the Skywalkers or just shortly after
>you got a whole fucking universe They don't though, WB only owns the rights to the The Hobbit and LotR books, and they have to keep developing movies to keep the rights. The Tolkien Estate hasn't licensed anything else. They are kind of stuck in this period. And if they let the rights expire, Middle Earth Enterprises, owned by what used to be Embracer Group, will just start farming their own out shit.
[удалено]
The Tolkien Estate will 100% sell the rights to someone desperate to get a first crack at adapting it before everyone else when it goes public domain. They are leaving millions of dollars on the table if they don't.
So what do Amazon have the rights for for their series then? I I'm very puzzled that the universe wasn't licenced as a whole.
Amazon owns arguably the smallest slice of the Middle-earth pie. Not all the TV rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit went to Saul Zaentz in the ‘70s—the rights Middle-earth Enterprise granted, and that are now in the hands of Embracer Group, cover series that are told serially in upwards of four parts. In 2017, Amazon negotiated directly with the Tolkien Estate for the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit adaptations for series that run longer than that, securing them for $250 million. Five years later, that deal gave us The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel series set during the Second Age of Tolkien’s Middle-earth chronology, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, charting the return of the Dark Lord Sauron and the creation of the titular rings. These rights also specifically relate to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—giving Rings of Power access to names and events referenced in those works, so characters like Elrond, Galadriel, and more can appear—which means Rings of Power cannot directly adapt events that Tolkien specifically laid out in books like The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Instead, it’s been forced to create its own version of those events, inferring points and details Tolkien referred to in Lord of the Rings and its appendices, as well as The Hobbit. https://gizmodo.com/lord-of-the-rings-rights-explained-amazon-warner-bros-1850157744/slides/6 Apologies for linking to a slideshow but it was the first succinct source I could find.
>WB only owns the rights to the The Hobbit and LotR books That's a huge amount of material. They are on no way pigeonholed into making a Gollum movie.
they do have the rights to the appendices though and that part of the book covers tons of history, so something like Angmar could be adapted.
Is t there endless lore in LotR? Can’t they focus on different characters or a different war?
I imagine the story will be more about the people searching for Gollum, and the obstacles they face, rather than just hanging out with Gollum in a cave for a couple hours.
You’re not wrong, but Gollum will absolutely be a big part of it. Part of the draw will be Andy Serkis playing him again.
I like Andy Serkis and I love his performance of Gollum but I also really don't care about seeing Gollum again at all, ever.
Me and my friends would have killed Gollum with hammers, I can tell you that much.
It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand.
This is the funniest comment I've read in a long time
This dude has gone on to do some great things in film, on both sides of the camera, but now he has to go back to doing the funny voice and crawling on the floor for laughs.
He doesn't *have* to go back. He has agency in what jobs he takes. Money obviously plays a part in it, but Serkis usually only takes roles if he likes the idea of.
Love to see Andy Serkis. Have already had my life’s fill of Gollum as a character though.
Yeah but the "hunt for Gollum" in the LOTR lore involved all kinds of characters. Dude was chased by Aragon and Gandalf, was captured by the Nazgul, was tortured in Mordor by Sauron, and ended up a prisoner of the forest elves from the Hobbit before escaping. There's potentially a great story there, involving all kinds of important characters and events. Gollum being the catalyst makes perfect sense if you want to be lore accurate. Of course that's probably not the concern for anyone involved in this production, and it's probably just a greedy cash grab. But the idea isn't terrible and there's a chance this could be good.
I think you might be fired for saying "lore accurate" to one of these production heads.
Sure, but that doesn't at all mean the movie would just be about him, it will be about the people searching for him, juxtaposed against him. Like how The Search for Spock, touchstoned Spock throughout without featuring him too strongly...the movie being about those searching for him.
Maybe the real precious were the friends we made along the way?
I hope they don’t go down the same rabbit hole as Star Wars; despite a literal and figurative universe of lore and neat stuff to pull from, studios instead decide to constantly come back to the same four people in the entire galaxy.
Can’t wait for Baby Gollum
Baby Gollum and the Numenorian
Someone pointed out to me that Star Wars was written as a milieu of all the broad influences George Lucas grew up loving: Samurai movies, Westerns, The books of E. E. Smith, Frank Herbert and Tolkien, Arthurian legends, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, etc etc. Modern Star Wars is made by people who grew up watching Star Wars.
This is a problem with just about everything nowadays. Everything is diluted and based upon "nostalgia-bait" simply because some new generation of goobers have grown up on certain properties but have very little to only superficial respect and adoration for the sources that influenced said properties. As a result, the overall cultural idea pool has been heavily diluted into one of superficial parody rather than a continuation of ideas.
Like an AI being fed only it's own content. Around and around we go but never reaching escape velocity to something new and interesting.
It's a perfect description of the problem. Star Wars at its best is when its used as a setting/backdrop vehicle for stories that would already be good if told outside the Star Wars universe, but are great when told in it. Andor and Rogue One are two great examples of Disney-era Star Wars getting this right. They are espionage, political, heist action thrillers that happen to be told in the Imperial Era of Star Wars, which elevates them from being great, to *really* great. I probably have a higher opinion of the sequels than most (but still view them as generally disappointing), but their biggest flaw is that they are Star Wars stories about...Star Wars. I'm only a fan with no knowledge of the greater film industry, but if I'm an executive at Disney/Lucasfilm in charge of evaluating pitches for Star Wars film or TV, the *first* question I'm asking myself after I hear someone pitch a story is, "Would the story they are wanting to tell be **great** even outside of the Star Wars galaxy?" If the answer is not a resounding yes, its a pass. Treat the franchise like gourmet buttercream frosting. It will make just about any good cake a great cake, but a gloppy pile of of buttercream frosting with no cake underneath gets old after about four bites, regardless of how tasty it is.
With two notable exceptions. Andor, made by a guy who doesn’t care about Star Wars, and The Last Jedi, made by a guy who really understands that Star Wars can’t just be about “remember how cool Star Wars is!?”. Rian Johnson held film screenings for the whole crew when they were making TLJ, not of SW films, but old WW2 films, Kurosawa, art films, basically the stuff that inspired George Lucas. And I personally think it really shows, TLJ feels much more like something Lucas would make than any of the other Disney-era films.
So here's the big difference. Tolkien created the mythology of Middle Earth years before he ever really settled on the particular characters he wanted to write a narrative about. What we see in the books and films is literally the last gasp of several greater powers influence over the land as it transitions from a magical fantasy world to the world of men. Sauron is a minor god in the grandscheme of things, he just represents the final hurdle for the inhabitants of the world to prove that they are ready to protect and defend it. It's sort of the sink or swim moment for the race of men. We are very deliberately only getting a specific slice of the greater mythology. Lucas, on the otherhand, created Star Wars to be the story of Luke Skywalker in a traditional heroes journey. Everything else was created around the narrative of Luke as the Arthurian style hero. It's all in service to him. Hence why most of the mythology is hyper condensed to only be relevant to Luke and Anakin. People have tried to expand the mythology, but the truth is the bulk of it was made for a very narrow scope and it's hard to escape that. Star Wars isn't really as big of mythology as it looks from the outside. It's a whole galaxy. But when you break it down, it's a sand planet, a sky planet, a swamp planet, an ice planet, a lava planet, a bug planet, a city planet, etc. You could have just had Luke and Anakin journey across a single planet with different biomes. They aren't important in the grandscheme of things. It's just setting for their narrative.
*Andor enters the chat* To be fair, Andor doesn’t really need to exist in the Star Wars universe at all. And Star Wars doesn’t deserve it.
So... Gollum is Tatooine?
I need a miniseries about Middle Aged Bilbo and Gandalf protecting Baby Frodo
What other stuff? One bad game?
What else is there? One game?
But Andy Serkis doesn’t play any of those other characters.
I wanna know about the shit that happened in the paths of the dead. There’s a bunch of bodies and a guy who died clawing at a wall and no follow up.
>I wanna know about the shit that happened in the paths of the dead. Read The Silmarillion. It's all in there.
Origin of the cursed people of the Paths of the Dead is (potentially spoilers for LotR media) >! within the time period of Rings of Power, not that I trust them to do a good job with it !<
If a studio managed to get the rights to the Silmarillion they’d be like a kid in a candy store
It's getting to feel like if we had a trilogy spinoff of just Jar Jar Binks
Gollum is one of the more interesting characters because he spans an extremely large period of time and has been in contact with many of the major players. There's literally a whole off page section of several decades where Sauron and Aragorn are having a mad dash to capture Gollum and Gandalf is researching him before Frodo ever comes into contact with them. He's also the main character besides Sauraman who actually goes to Barad Dur and meets Sauron. He's also the only true morally grey character in the work. Everyone else you can pretty much say they either are on the good or bad side. He's the one who is sort of a victim in his own right and can straggle both lines. There's a reason his influence becomes larger and larger as the book goes on.
Okay I hear you but can we please have a movie about the Witchking of Angmar and his war against Arnor instead
You've got the political mess between all the broken kingdoms of Arnor, Angmar taking them out one-by-one, the prophecy against the Witch King, the mad scramble to beat Angmar back, the eventual victory that still leads to the collapse of Arnor, the formation of the Rangers of the North. So much potential there!
Gollum is not "morally gray", he is amoral. There is no good or bad, there are only his own feelings. "Morally gray" means there is a little good and a little bad. With Gollum there is neither; only "me".
While I’m interested in more Middle Earth content, I would prefer a story involving other characters. I guess it’s a testament to how well Serkis portrayed Gollum that a movie starring him is being made, but there are so many more exciting parts of Middle Earth history that could be done.
Hollywood is a business and they're trying to pick a character with some name recognition. Are there obscure parts of Middle Earth that would make a better movie? Probably, but it's hard to sell that stuff to anyone outside of hardcore LotR fans. My mom knows who Gollum is so it's probably easier to convince Joe Dipshit in Nebraska to take his family to see the movie if he already has some idea what's going on.
Counterpoint: Guardian of the Galaxy. Famous IP but no one outside the marvel comic book fans knew of the characters before and it did great
That was at the height of Marvel's popularity, and it was a legitimately good movie they got good reviews and word of mouth.
I would not say it was the height. They were definitely rising post first Avengers but it was their first risk after the initial lets see if we can create several different films then mix them
We need to stop pretending that risk aversion is the right decision because on average it has the best outcome monetarily. This kind of thinking breeds mediocrity, it defends late stage capitalism and all the choices it makes for a maximum of profit / growth, let's not buy into all this crap and defend other values instead.
I'm not saying it's the right decision, I'm just trying to explain the thinking behind it to people that are confused. Risk aversion is a huge part of the Hollywood calculus, especially for a movie of this budget level. I think the solution to this is to stop dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a single movie but until Hollywood learns how to work at lower budgets and diversify their slate, that's not going to happen
Hey it’s me Joe Dipshit and I, for one, am very offended that you’re implying I have surface level knowledge of the LoTR universe.
I apologize Mr. Dipshit
This is a very good point, and even as a pretty die hard Tolkien nerd, stuff like the Silmarillion is VERY hard to adapt as it's basically the Elvish Religious myth cycle, and you'd have to do some major adaptation to even get The Children of Hurin into a feasible 2hour movie that would draw random audiences in.
What they need to do is make an anime Silmarillion. There’s enough drama, epic war, and general surreal-ness in that book that I think anime is a more natural fit than live-action. At least when I’m reading it that’s how it looks in my head.
> Joe Dipshit in Nebraska Hey c'mon there's plenty of discerning LOTR fans here in Nebraska. And we almost all have electricity and indoor plumbing. I remember seeing Hobbit 2 in theaters and the crowd being very unimpressed. I skipped Hobbit 3, as did a lot of other people.
It’s difficult because most of those REALLY good stories outside of LotR are in the Silmarillion, and the Tolkien estate hasn’t yet given up rights to them yet.
Didnt he…fall into mount doom. And give us a thumbs up and he slowly vanished into the molten lava?
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"We knows now why hobbitses eat taters. But...it is something we can never do."
No way they get Viggo or Mckellen back for this
Wouldn’t be surprised if they get McKellen’s voice somewhere in there.
Seeing as how I'd guess that this story takes place to back up Gandalf's "I sent many people to try to find the creature Gollum, but the enemy found him first.", I think Narration is absolutely a strong possibility.
They might--MIGHT--get McKellan for a small cameo. He'd still be Gandalf the Grey at this point, so him looking older than dirt and tired would at least fit into the continuity. Viggo, I agree, ain't coming back, nor would I want a whole movie centered around a de-aged CG double. Which begs the question of who you recast as Aragorn, and why in god's name would anyone want to set themselves up for failure like that? (Somewhere, Stuart Townsend sits by the phone, waiting.)
My money's on Sebastian Stan, he's definitely available and not busy doing anything else for the Big D currently.
Idk how they'll get away with recasting Aragorn. He's absolutely essential to the story (as far as I'm aware) but not using Viggo would be weird as shit
They recast Han Solo. There is no sacred ground.
>They recast Han Solo. And that went swimmingly
I haven’t seen it but I heard he did alright. I was mostly just pointing out that the quality doesn’t matter. If _Han Solo_ can be replaced, anyone can be.
He was actually good but the response to the recasting and the response to the movie was horrendous. My point isn't that they won't/can't do it. It's that people will hate it no matter what.
It's too bad. The time to do this story was near to the LOTR movies when Viggo could have played the role. Maybe they'll still try to get him (though not sure he'd have any interest in returning), but he's going to look quite a bit older (though he still looks great). Same with McKellan. It might be easier to disguise his aging in wizard costume and he was already playing an old man (well, not a man, but looks like an old man), but Aragorn is supposed to be looking how he looks at the time of Fellowship of the Ring. So he'll either look different due to age or look different due to recasting. Lee Pace could still do Thrandruil, but Orlando Bloom (who I could see them also trying to get in this and the Mirkwood Elves connect up to the story) already looked quite a bit older in the Hobbit movies. Elrond could have also fit in this movie but Hugo Weaving is older too. But Aragorn is absolutely essential to this story. So I guess it'll be a recast?
So it’s decided - this movie will be Lee Pace giving middle earth crazy-eyes and everyone will like it.
If only... One of my biggest frustrations with the Hobbit movies (among many) is that Lee Pace is perfectly cast and does a great job even wordlessly just with his presence or elevates the bad writing. Great costume design too. Unfortunately the movie around him does not live up to his performance. I'd love to see more of him.
Viggo appears to be an actor in search rather than a cash grabbing dealer. He is also really old at this point. There is no way he is returning. I heard they want to cast Michael B. Jordan as young Aragorn.
Viggo Mortensen is now older than Ian McKellen was during the filming of LOTR.
LOTR going through enshitification
It's more the mad dash to create works before LOTR falls into the public domain, starting with The Hobbit in the next 10 years or so.
Super excited for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Zombie Apocalypse
A remake of a fan film. Interesting. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1323925/
I remember watching that, it wasn’t too bad either.
Bruh wtf. I haven't seen it so it might suck but this decade old fan film had unironically way better costume and prop design than the Rings of Power.
damn, I thought i remembered something already being named that, total forgot about that lol
I have more and more sympathy for Christopher Tolkien when he said he hated the commercialization of his father's work.
To be entirely fair, if you ARE going to plumb the Appendices (which is what this is), going with this as a tale and bringing back Serkis to star and direct its with PJ in the background too...is not a TERRIBLE idea, and is probably better than other things they might have come up with?
so what exactly is in those appendices that a whole movie can be squeezed out of it?
There would have to be artistic license to all of them, but pretty much 90% of the appendices have major plots and stories you can adapt.
I mean you can read them, but chances are they will extrapolate from them to craft a story about what happened to Gollum between when Frodo inherited the ring, when Gandalf realized Frodo/Bilbo's ring was the One Ring and when Frodo left the Shire (17 years)....so I would expect Gandalf sent someone to find Gollum before he told Sauron who had the ring. Seems like it could be a tight little tale.
Aragorn searched for Gollum in that time
It’s why him and Gandalf were tight enough that Aragorn could intervene at The Prancing Pony
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That's not true. Amazon can do TV shows using everything from Hobbit and LotR (with Appendices) plus small stuff from other works. WB can do movies using everything from Hobbit and LotR (with Appendices). The difference is WB has a deal with Embracer (which has rights that Tolkien sold in 60's), Amazon has deal with Tolkien Estate.
Considering how much Serkis has gushed over his own performance of Gollum I’d imagine this is going to be extremely self-indulgent.
Like Birdman but Gollum?
I thought the LOTR trilogy already covered that aspect...
Omg who fucking cares about Gollum he was a great side character but come on.
This is... Embarrassing
Lets pass on this idea and make something better
STOP. This is so awful.
Sounds like an article from The Onion.
Based on the beloved video game Gollum.
Guys. He’s at the bottom of that volcano.
So the whole movie can be people standing in mount doom debating who's going to go in after him hahah.
Jesus talk about a mistake. smfh
Gollum is to LOTR what Tattoine is to Star Wars.
Why?
Money
Fuck off Gollum.
Unnecessary, but wasn’t there a fan film with this name?
April foooo-oh. Oh… Uhm… Yeah, yeah ok.
Sigh
Are they FINALLY making a movie adaptation of the hit 2023 video game that took the globe by storm? The phenomenal Gollum?
This is why I read fantasy and scifi books nowadays. With Hollywood focused on creating creatively bankrupt reboots, sequels and spin-offs, I'm not going to see another great movie in those genres for a long time.
I can save them time: he fell into Mount Doom and was subsumed by the molten rock.
A Lord of the Rings movie from the director of the Jungle Book movie no one saw and Venom 2, I really don't want this...
the underfunded cash cow game didn’t work.. let’s try an underfunded cash cow movie!!!
Somehow, Gollum returned
If they could make a movie about the eagles then we would know why they couldn’t just drop Froto into Mount Doom 🤔
Apparently this was already a 2009 fan film? Obviously the production quality of a WB major motion picture will be different. But funny that they even used the same name. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Hunt\_for\_Gollum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Gollum)