If it felt like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had covered every meaningful corner of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world, you’d be wrong. In a recent social media post, Jackson himself revealed that a new Lord of the Rings movie, under the working title The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, is officially in the works, with The Late Show host Stephen Colbert on board as a writer.
The timing of the announcement doesn’t seem accidental, as The Lord of the Rings universe has slowly been picking up momentum again, with multiple projects already in motion, whether it’s Andy Serkis’ The Hunt for Gollum or Season 3 of Prime Video’s The Rings of Power.
Peter Jackson and Stephen Colbert Team Up for The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Warner Bros. wants to expand the original The Lord of the Rings universe with material we haven’t really seen on screen before, and the newly announced Shadow of the Past is exactly what the doctor ordered.
This so-called upcoming The Lord of the Rings “sequel” will be structured around two timelines, with one following Sam, Merry, and Pippin fourteen years after Frodo’s departure as they retrace the earliest steps of their journey, while the other will revisit those early chapters, covering a stretch of The Fellowship of the Ring that the films largely condensed, from “Three Is Company” through to “Fog on the Barrow-Downs.”
As per the official logline for The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, “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.”
The movie will also open the door to parts of J. R. R. Tolkien’s story that have long sat just outside the original films, including the Hobbits’ extended journey through the Shire and their encounter with Tom Bombadil, who helped Frodo Baggins and his Hobbit companions on their journey to destroy the Ring but was largely absent from the original film adaptation.
Colbert’s The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past will try to bring the story full circle, using a “framing device” that Colbert says he and his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, came up with to follow the Hobbits’ early adventures alongside a later thread where Sam’s daughter, Elanor, gets to the bottom of just how close the War of the Ring came to falling apart.
Behind the scenes, the project sees Peter Jackson working again with longtime collaborator Philippa Boyens, with Stephen Colbert coming in as a co-writer alongside his son, Peter McGee. In the announcement, Colbert emphasized that the goal is to stay closely aligned with the timeline and tone established by the original trilogy, while still making room for a story that hadn’t been explored on screen.
“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 Late Show host also revealed that once the idea for the film came together, he reached out to Peter Jackson, and over the past two years, they’ve worked with longtime collaborator Philippa Boyens to develop the script. As of writing, casting details are still under wraps, but given that the story will move between the Hobbits’ early journey and later events, we could see some of the original cast reprising their iconic roles.
