The Fellowship of the Ring — the opening chapter of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the greatest achievements in movie history — turns 25 this December, and since then, Hollywood has inflicted one indignity after another on Tolkien’s masterpiece. The worst may be yet to come.
It’s hard to do worse than what Amazon Prime did to Tolkien with the ill-conceived, miscast, and excruciatingly costly Rings of Power. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars just to secure the rights to certain Tolkien appendices (!!!) from his estate, Amazon then turned Galadriel into a sword-waving girl-boss and Sauron into a likable bad boy. And those are the show’s better features, according to my wife, who keeps trying to watch the thing.
By the time the series comes to a merciful end with Season Five, Amazon will have spent more than a billion dollars on a series with sharply declining viewership, shrinking budgets, and, at best, mixed audience reception.
Jackson himself hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory since The Return of the King, returning to the well at least twice too often with his follow-up Hobbit trilogy. He took a kids’ book you can rush through without much effort, and turned it into a bloated eight-hour trilogy filled with comically bad CGI.
Even now, Jackson (having turned the director’s reins over to Gollum actor Andy Serkis) is hard at work producing The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. Because I guess audiences just can’t wait to see every last detail of what happened to the little runt in the cracks between The Hobbit and Fellowship.
It’s what I call “strip-mining the IP.” New Line Cinema purchased the rights to The Lord of the Rings almost 30 years ago, and did them such glorious justice with the original movie trilogy. Inevitably, Jackson and New Line set about extracting every last bit of wealth until the original property looked like the Shire after the Scouring.
What’s it called when the greedy mining company takes the tailings from its strip mine and runs them through the smelter one more time with all the reckless abandon of Gollum diving after the One Ring into Mount Doom?
Ah, yes — it’s called The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, and lame-duck late-night host Stephen Colbert will co-write it with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, for Jackson and Warner Bros, which now owns New Line. Variety reported late Tuesday that Colbert, “a vocal Tolkien fanatic,” and McGee will write a screenplay “from chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation.”
Or as the movie’s official logline put it, “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.”
So Shadows of the Past won’t really take us back to 2001 and fill in the missing parts of Fellowship. It will take aging versions of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin and saddle them with an all-new girl-boss.
Fan reactions on X range from “I’d rather jump into the fires of Mount Doom” to “What is this need to mar great artistic works with slop fan fiction manglings?” Despite my best time-wasting efforts, I was unable to find a single positive response.
Maybe Colbert is a vocal enough Tolkien fan to make this work. Or maybe Jackson and his crew should do what Sauron couldn’t, and just leave the Shire alone.
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