An all-new Lord of the Rings franchise is coming, per Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
On Thursday, Zaslav announced that The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum will hit theaters in 2026. It is expected to be the first in a series of new Rings movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novels.
Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Rings trilogy, will star and direct. Jackson, along with his wife and co-writer Fran Walsh, will produce and write the script.
Jackson’s trilogy made nearly three billion dollars between 2001 and 2003. The final chapter, 2003’s The Return of the King, won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.
Between 2012 and 2014, Jackson returned to Tolkien’s Middle Earth with three Hobbit movies. This trilogy also made around three billion dollars. But no one liked it very much. After producing ten hours of Rings movies, Jackson had obviously run out of things to say. The Hobbit movies were CGI spectacles and not much else.
Then came Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in 2022, an eight-episode streaming series that went woke and was hit with fan ridicule and a hearty backlash. Apparently, Amazon has committed to four more seasons.
And now, here we go again with even more Rings.
Warner Bros. Discovery is also returning to the Harry Potter franchises. After eight films between 2001 and 2011, those very same books are set to be adapted into a seven-season streaming series for Max. Yes, it’s the same stories from the same books. But instead of 2.5 hours devoted to each book, fans will enjoy ten hours.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s other big franchise is more superhero crap, starting with another Superman movie next year.
We were making fun of the whole idea of sequels in the 1980s. Who would have thought it could get this much worse? And Hollywood is still making sequels out of 80s movies: Rocky, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Karate Kid, Rambo, Alien, Child’s Play, Predator, Halloween, Terminator, Indiana Jones, Fletch, Batman, Star Trek, Evil Dead, etc.
The Disney Grooming Syndicate has basically boiled itself down to Marvel and Toy Story/Frozen/Princess/Star Wars.
This weekend, we get a new Planet of the Apes movie—the TENTH chapter in a 56-year-old franchise.
Honestly, at this rate, in 20 years, all the studios will have meshed into a single studio, and that one studio will simply tell the same story over and over again.
Tell me it doesn’t feel like that now.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
