I'm Worried About the New Lord of the Rings Movie

Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum has been announced! But do we need it? Well, let's talk about that. At least Peter Jackson is back, with Andy Serkis in to direct. In this video, I go over my worries with what they'll do with Gollum, Aragorn, Gollum and more.

[wstine]

"We loves the idea of a Gollum movie."
"NO! WE HATES IT!"

[MarwanComedy]

1 full page you said???
- Warner bros: that's at LEAST 3 movies!

[AnthonyAvon]

Literally the source material: "There is little need to tell of them."
The industry: "Can we make it a trilogy? JRRTCU?"

[davidroddick]

The problem with the Hobbit movies was that they tried to make three epic films from one book, and strayed so far from the source material I had no idea what movie I was watching. If they had just made one movie, maybe they could have made something decent.
Now they're going to try to make an epic film from a couple of paragraphs. I have a bad feeling about this.

[davidchristie]

I recently made the decision to not engage at all with anything that smells even slightly of cynical brand extension. I have not been disappointed by any media products (not art) since.

[zacharymccoy]

First the video game, now this. What is it about Gollum that makes people think he's an interesting character in a way that's not covered by the films and books?

[TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I can almost guarantee that Jackson and Serkis don't want to do this. But they know that if they don't do it, it'll be given to someone else and then it would be even worse.

[yammt]

Me too. All I want is for Pete and Guillermo to do 4-5 seasons of a dark adult-animated Silmarillion. It's right there... And nobody will do it.

[KiraLawliet]

If I had a nickel for every questionable Lord of the Rings spinoff title centering exclusively around Gollum that literally nobody asked for, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.

[joeylowry]

I'm guessing someone from WB saw the hunt for gollum short fan film on YouTube and said "hey we can steal this and make it bad!"

[ivomeesters]

All ideas we wanted but will never get due to Evil:

Creation of Ea and the Valar establishing themselves
The story of Beren and Luthien
Story of Turin Turambar
The fall of Gondolin
The story of Feanor
The Silmarils

[BrotherhoodWorkshop]

Good thoughts. In recent years I have adopted the following philosophy toward new installments in my favorite franchises: "If it's good, I'll watch it. If it's bad I'll ignore it." Which is why I haven't watched Rings of Power. I don't even know if it's bad, but enough people seem to think so that I decided "I'll just reread the books instead. Those never disappoint."

[rogueguardian]

My first reaction to seeing this was like WHY?! No one's asking for this.

[mplbooks]

I worked in publishing, and your copy (and probably many of them) suffers from printer slippage--the pages, as they are printed and trimmed, can slip and the margins shift. At least it didn't get completely cut off! (Though QC tries to find and toss copies that go that far.)

[Gum_Cuzzler]

There’s some kind of symbolism with how as the LoTR IP becomes increasingly monetized to the detriment of the quality it focuses more and more on the character of Gollum; a creature who lost their humanity because of their inability to let go of a shiny object

[alltradesjack]

Hey, printer here...
There could have been a pagenation error, in which the bleeds are wrong, because they are set up in reverse. The outside edges and the bind edge have different bleed margins, and if you mix them up you get all kinds of wonky errors; text on the edge of the page, text going into the seam of the spine, and even pages coming out of order (though that big of an error rarely gets to market)

[CinnamonGrrlErin]

Not that I really want anymore LOTR (or any franchise really, I'm so tired of it all), but why not make The Scouring of the Shire into a movie? That's a huge chunk of the story that never made it to the screen, and it has a lot going on. Watching Aragorn and Gandalf hunt for baby-snatching Gollum doesn't even sound that interesting, and Andy Serkis is 60, he's probably not even going to do the physical role of Gollum anyway.

[dylives]

Remember the slop you got served last time?

Well, expect even worse slop.

[zez_gval]

You raised the most important aspect of this to me. How do you even tell an interesting story, where the characters go through a development arc, when the whole thing is basically a filler episode to LOTR?
The fan-film is 40 minutes long and even with that runtime it happens almost nothing.
I'm betting it's going to be just an action movie set on Middle-Earth, with Aragorn killing Orcs and Gollum escaping Mordor.

[dashsocur]

Fully agree. If they "had" to do a movie tie-in, I think they would have been much better served doing a "Thorongil" story (ie: when Aragorn served both Rohan and Gondor while in disguise). He's young enough at that point that a recast is completely justified and honestly the only characters that could need the original cast would be Elrond, Arwen, Galadriel, and Gandalf (and not of them are critical to telling it properly).