It's official: Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen will star in the new Lord of the Rings movie alongside Kate Winslet
Warner Bros studio officially confirmed on Tuesday that Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen will return to the roles of Frodo and Gandalf for “The Hunt for Gollum”, the next “Lord of the Rings” film scheduled for release in 2027. Kate Winslet will also star alongside them, reports Variety magazine.
Whether Wood, now 45, 86, would return to the beloved roles was an open secret for some time, as was the fact that producers offered Winslet the female lead in the Andy Serkis-directed feature.
But Warner Bros had only officially confirmed the return of Serkis, the now 61-year-old British actor who played Gollum in the original “Lord of the Rings” films and the “Hobbit” trilogy that followed a decade later.
The legendary American film studio waited until this year's CinemaCon, one of the largest cinema-related events held in the US, to officially announce the return of Wood and McKellen, as well as the rest of the main cast, on Tuesday.
A surprise announcement was that American actor Lee Pace will also reprise his role as Thranduil, the elven king he played in The Hobbit films. Kate Winslet will play the role of Marigol, a character that Warner Bros. did not provide more details about at CinemaCon either.
Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan, known from the “Fifty Shades” movies, will play Strider, who is later revealed in Tolkien's original novel to be Aragorn.
Warner Bros plans to release The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum in theaters on December 17, 2027, if filming goes according to plan.
What the new Lord of the Rings movie will be about
As the film's title suggests, it will follow Gollum's quest in the years leading up to the events of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Filming is scheduled to begin at the end of May in New Zealand, where Winslet was recently in for James Cameron's feature film Avatar: Fire and Ash, in which she played Ronal.
British author JRR Tolkien originally wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1950s, following the success of his novel The Hobbit, published in 1937.
New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings novels into a trilogy of films released in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and later expanded The Hobbit into a trilogy of his own, with feature films premiering in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
The Lord of the Rings movies were a huge success
The feature films directed by Jackson were a major success at the box office and were also appreciated by film critics. Together they grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide and won 17 Academy Awards.
“The Return of the King,” the feature film that concluded the trilogy, won the 2004 Academy Award for Best Picture and 10 other Academy Awards, including Best Director.
“The Return of the King” triumphed in every category for which it was nominated and, with 11 wins, equaled the record held by “Titanic” and the 1959 feature film “Ben-Hur” for the most Oscar statuettes won at a single ceremony of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Serkis' portrayal of Gollum in the second and third Lord of the Rings films was a turning point in motion capture technology, introducing innovative digital effects by Weta Workshop. Serkis reprized his role as Gollum in the first film of the “Hobbit” series.
He will direct the new The Hunt for Gollum film, while Peter Jackson will executive produce. The screenwriters of the original films, longtime collaborators of the New Zealand filmmaker, have also returned for the new project.
A second Lord of the Rings movie in the works at Warner Bros
Confirmation of the main cast for “The Hunt for Gollum” comes less than a month after Warner Bros. announced in a real coup that it had been secretly working for two years on a separate “Lord of the Rings” movie called “The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past.”
It will be made by the famous American TV presenter Stephen Colbert.
“You know what books mean to me and what your movies mean to me,” Colbert told Jackson in a video call. “But the thing I kept coming back to, reading over and over again, were the six chapters at the beginning [‘Frăției Inelului’] that you guys didn't develop in the first movie at the time,” he continued.
“Basically, it's about the chapter 'Three is Company' [Capitolul III] to 'Fog on the Barrow-Downs' [Capitolul VIII]. And I thought, 'Wait a minute, maybe this could be a stand-alone story that fits into the bigger story. Could we do something completely true to the books, but at the same time completely true to the movies you've already made?'” the 61-year-old TV presenter explained.
The Warner Bros studio is producing the new “Lord of the Rings” films by virtue of its partnership with Embracer Group, the Swedish media holding that bought the extended rights to the “Lord of the Rings” franchise in 2021.
“The Rings of Power,” the “Lord of the Rings” series on the Amazon Prime Video streaming platform, is produced by Amazon studio MGM as part of a separate deal with Tolkien's heirs prior to the deal with Embracer Group.
