You might have thought there surely can’t be any more Lord of the Rings left to be adapted into any more movie, after Peter Jackson created over 21 hours of the stuff, and with 2027’s The Hunt for Gollum already being filmed. And yet Deadline is now reporting that once his tenure as host of The Late Show comes to an end, Stephen Colbert is set to adapt yet another new LotR film.
This next venture is to be based on “Fogs on the Barrow-downs,” which is the eighth chapter of the first book in the Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. And you might think, surely that should have come up in the first movie? But this will right what many saw as a wrong back in 2001 and return Tom Bombadil to the tale, after the character and a whole slew of chapters were left out of the original adaptation. Speaking to Peter Jackson about the project, Colbert explained that he has found himself repeatedly re-reading those missing chapters, and believed it was possible to adapt into a new movie that would be faithful to both the novels and films.
Peter Jackson, the director of all six Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies, has seemed somewhat adrift of late. The one-time master of wonderfully schlocky horror hasn’t directed a fiction movie in over a decade, instead just dabbling in peculiar Beatles-based projects while never actually making Tintin films, but he will apparently be involved in the eighth entry in New Line’s Tolkien-based franchise. The current working title is The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, and dear god I hope that changes given just how un-LotR it sounds, and will be written by Stephen Colbert alongside regular LotR writer Philippa Boyens and Colbert’s son, screenwriter Peter McGee.
Colbert, booted out of his tenure this summer as host of The Late Show—a move which Colbert and his fans see as a sacrifice to Trump by Paramount to get its Skydance merger approved, though of course the network says it has nothing to do with that—will have plenty of time to focus on the script. The Tolkien obsessive is clearly fulfilling a lifelong dream with the project, although it’ll be a fair while before we see anything of it, I’d guess 2029 at the earliest.