New Lord of the Rings movie about Gollum coming in 2026

Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that the company would be producing new Lord of the Rings movies, but said very little about what they would be about — riddles in the dark, if you will. It’s been a long 15 months since then, but the latest Middle-earth adventure has finally been revealed: Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by and starring Andy Serkis.

“A Gollum movie?” you might say. “How derivative! Wasn’t there just a video game about this?”

Indeed there was, constant reader. However, the film might differ in the very crucial manner of being a pleasurable experience.

According to Variety, the film is still early in development, with a script being worked on by Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou alongside Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens — who, along with Peter Jackson, have signed on as co-producers that WBD CEO David Zaslav says will be involved “every step of the way.”

Even though the story is actively being worked on — the title also isn’t final — we can safely surmise that it is a prequel, as Gollum, famously, is super dead by the end of The Return of the King. Book readers might take this premise to suggest the story is set in the nebulous and quite long period between Bilbo’s Party at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, and the beginning of the quest to destroy the Ring, when Gandalf sent Aragorn to find Gollum.

That said, there is probably a reason why both book and films never really bothered to recount this particular side quest in detail: It doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular. And as the first of a planned “batch” of new Rings movies, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, no matter how badly I may want to see Andy Serkis in a movie again.