Lord of the Rings film about Gollum announced with Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis returning

New Lord of the Rings films will be launched in 2026 focusing on Andy Serkis’ Gollum character.

Original trilogy filmmaker Peter Jackson and collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are producing the movie and “will be involved every step of the way,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said when announcing it. The films are in the early stages of script development and will “explore storylines yet to be told,” Zaslav added.

Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum will be directed by and star Serkis, 60, in the iconic titular role. Warner Bros. executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy are also involved. Serkis said in a statement: “Yesssss, Precious, the time has come once more to venture into the unknown with my dear friends, the extraordinary and incomparable guardians of Middle Earth Peter, Fran and Philippa.

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“With Mike and Pam, and the Warner Bros team on the quest as well, alongside WETA and our filmmaking family in New Zealand, it’s just all too delicious…” A separate, animated Middle-earth movie, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is due out on December 13 and made by Warner Bros. and director Kenji Kamiyama. It is set 200 years before the events of The Hobbit.

Andy Serkis will return as Gollum for the new film
(Image: New Line/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

Prime Video released Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power in 2022, with a second season due this year. Jackson’s trilogy starred Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen and Cate Blanchett and won 17 Academy Awards. In 2022, fans were able to revisit Middle Earth thanks to the Amazon series Lord of the Rings: The Ring of Power.

It was set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took place. The series broke records as it was dubbed the most expensive TV show ever to be made. The epic eight-part series Rings of Power set the global company back £209 million (€243 million) just for the rights alone and £47 million (€55 million) per episode.

The original three Lord of the Rings films from 2001-2003 covered the novel J.R.R Tolkien toiled over for 12 years. But The Rings of Power, developed by screenwriters JD Payne and Patrick McKay, is based on a 150-page collection of fictional histories Tolkien created called The Silmarillion.

Like the original trilogy, the show was initially filmed in New Zealand and took viewers back to the era in which the kingdoms rose to glory before falling to ruin. The reaction to the trilogy was mixed - but that's always the way with much-loved book-to-screen adaptations. There's the familiar age-old clash of devoted buffs admonishing anything that doesn't strictly follow the original story, while others will enjoy the new series for what it is.