Warner Bros. has announced that Stephen Colbert and his son are developing a brand new Lord of the Rings movie. The announcement came Tuesday night via the studio’s various social media accounts.
In a video call with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, Colbert announced that he will be writing a script with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, based on chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation. The duo developed the script with long-time Jackson collaborator, screenwriter Philippa Boyens.
“You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert told Jackson. “But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [‘The Fellowship of the Ring’] that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ [Chapter III] through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’ [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
The film’s official logline reads, “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.”
Colbert is arguably the biggest Tolkien super-fan in Hollywood, possessing encyclopedic knowledge of the books, so his involvement makes sense. He will tackle the project, currently titled Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ends this summer.
There is no word who will be directing the film or when it will be released.