Stephen Colbert is making his own journey to Middle-earth.
The “Late Show” host and “The Lord of the Rings” superfan is co-writing the script for the franchise’s next installment, working alongside his son, Peter McGee, and original trilogy director Peter Jackson.
Warner Bros. announced the collaboration on social media Wednesday in honor of Tolkien Reading Day.
The announcement included a video of Jackson sharing updates on another upcoming project, Andy Serkis’ “The Hunt for Gollum.”
“Andy is doing a terrific job. It’s looking amazing,” Jackson said. “The script is coming together really well and I think it’s going to be a really good film.” The project is set to be released in 2027.
Following those updates, Jackson introduced his “very special partner” for a separate project titled “The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past” — Colbert.
Colbert explained the film’s plot comes from chapters of “The Fellowship of the Ring” that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation.
“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 ya’ll never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three is Company’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs.’ And I thought, ‘Oh wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story.’”
Colbert said the goal is to remain “completely faithful” to both J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s film trilogy.
Colbert developed the “framing device” for the film with McGee, a screenwriter, before pitching the idea to Jackson. The trio has been working on the script for the last two years with Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the original film trilogy.
The original 2001-03 film trilogy, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” followed Frodo and members of the fellowship on a journey to destroy the One Ring and the villain Sauron.
The official logline for “The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past” 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.”
This is not the first time Colbert has collaborated with Jackson. The late-night show host previously had a small role in 2013’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” He also directed a 2019 short film, “Darrylgorn,” involving Jackson, Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen set in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, according to Variety.
However, the project does mark Colbert’s first involvement in a blockbuster film’s development.
How do fans feel?
You’ll be hard pressed to find comments online that support the latest development. Those comments exist, sure, but they’re not easy to find. The vast majority of reactions sound a little something like this:
One user on X even questioned the date of the announcement: “Is it April’s first already?”
Despite the uproar from some of the “The Lord of the Rings” fanbase, others are holding out hope the upcoming film will live up to the hype already created from the original films.
One fan wrote, “Stay true to the original. Don’t make it a money-grabbing joke. Show respect to the originals and the story itself, and I think fans will latch on. I want to.”
Another shared they are only “slightly interested” in the upcoming sequel because “it is being written by Colbert, he’s someone who has a lot of passion and love for that world so that’s interesting but also I just wish they weren’t doing this.”