Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum director and star Andy Serkis has said the upcoming film may feature characters from other films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit.
As reported by Popverse, Gollum actor Serkis said at ACE Superhero Comic Con 2024 that “there may be characters that we recognize” in The Hunt for Gollum, which is apparently a working title for the 2026 film.
“It’s going to very much be the world of Middle-earth according to Gollum’s experience of it,” Serkis said. “It is so early, it would be unfair to commit to anything at this point. But I will say that it will be a deep dive where we investigate Gollum’s character. There may be characters that we recognize that might be coming back. I’m not going to say who.”
Serkis not revealing who may return is likely because he doesn’t know, as based on comments from The Hunt for Gollum co-writer and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit triogies director Peter Jackson, the creators don’t have a story together yet.
There may be characters that we recognize that might be coming back.
“We really want to explore his backstory and delve into those parts of his journey we didn’t have time to cover in the earlier films,” Jackson said at the time. “It’s too soon to know who will cross his path, but suffice to say we will take our lead from [original author J.R.R. Tolkien].”
The Hunt for Gollum was announced on May 9, 2024 when an early script was being worked on, but Serkis said discussions only began around eight months ago, meaning roughly in October 2023.
“They were saying, ‘Andy we really want to reinvigorate Middle-earth. There are so many fresh stories that we want to get involved with. We want to launch this new wave by taking us back into the world of Gollum.’ They asked me to direct,” Serkis said. “This is a dream come true, to work with the people I love working with in a country I adore working in.”
Comments about reinvigorating Middle-earth are a tad more sentimental than the language used by those who own the Lord of the Rings franchise. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslaz said, for example, that The Lord of the Rings is a “largely underused” franchise that his company is “hard at work fixing.” CEO of The Lord of the Rings owner Embracer Group Lars Wingefors, meanwhile, said the company needs to be “exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion” on the video game front.
Regardless, both 65-year-old Aragorn actor Viggo Mortensen and 85-year-old Gandalf actor Ian McKellen are open to returning to the franchise. The former will only star in The Hunt for Gollum if it makes sense for him and his character, however, while the latter, rather morbidly, said he’d do it if he was still alive.
The Lord of the Rings was once a standalone trilogy but the canonical film universe is slowly but surely expanding, first through The Hobbit Trilogy but now through several other films and TV shows.
Amazon has continued the franchise with its The Rings of Power TV show, Season 1 of which released in 2022 on Prime Video. Season 2 is set to premiere on August 29, 2024 and, in February 2024, showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne extended their partnership with Amazon and signed a new three-year deal with the company to kick off early work on Season 3.
Elsewhere in Tolkien’s world sits The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated film set to tell the story behind the fortress of Helm’s Deep and the mighty King of Rohan Helm Hammerhand when it premieres on December 13, 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.