A newly announced “Lord of the Rings” movie is getting trashed online after Warner Bros. announced that late-night host Stephen Colbert will develop the project with his son.
The announcement came via social media on Tuesday night, which was also Tolkien Reading Day.
First, film director Peter Jackson gave an update on the sequel “The Hunt for Gollum,” which is currently in production. “Andy [Serkis] is doing a terrific job. It’s looking amazing. The script is coming together really well, and I think it’s going to be a really good film,” Jackson said before revealing what’s up next.
The director had Colbert join him on the video after announcing he’d be writing “The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past.” Colbert explained that the movie would be based on chapters of “The Fellowship of the Ring” that weren’t in Jackson’s 2001 film.
In honor of Tolkien Reading Day and the destruction of the One Ring, we bring you a special announcement. pic.twitter.com/ufh9RLBIxO
— Warner Bros. (@warnerbros) March 25, 2026
“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?’”
Colbert said that he and his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, have been working with Jackson on the project for two years.
The hyper-partisan, Trump-hating late-night host made headlines last year after CBS canceled his “Late Show,” which led to him crying censorship rather than admitting that the program had been allegedly hemorrhaging money for years. CBS confirmed it was a financial decision to sunset the program.
Most reactions to Colbert’s new gig were negative.
“This is by far the worst thing to ever happen to the franchise,” one X user wrote.
“Is it gonna have a sequence with dancing vaccine syringes? What about an evil orange man?” another person wondered.
“No, absolutely not,” a third commenter said. “Colbert hasn’t been anything remotely close to a competent writer, comedy or otherwise, for a very long time. Just the thought of the Lord of the Rings getting put through a heavily political infusion, Colbert only schtick at this point, is sickening.”
“Imagine burning billions on rings of power and still not learning any lessons from it,” another commenter wrote, referencing the controversial, widely panned Amazon series based on the fantasy series.
The film’s description for “Shadows of the Past” says, “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.”
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” was turned into three massively popular films, with releases in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Jackson’s epic fantasy trilogy is considered the highlight of his career and won 17 Academy Awards.
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