He cares about the material. That is not the problem. The studio and producers are the problem. They will fuck it up every time. Just look at the Ring of Power. Bezos threw a billion dollars at it. It should have been good. However , the writers apparently did not know or understand the source.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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I'm a bit confused as you started off saying it'll be bad despite the writing because other productions ended up being bad because of the writing.
I'm really not. At least he'll be a writer that actually knows and deeply cares about the source material, which seems quite rare these days.
Neither the writer nor the director is a problem. The problem is studio interference. The Hobbit was written. Peter Jackson did a fantastic Lord of the Rings.
So we had a perfect story and the perfect director. But then the studio said, "We need The Hobbit to be two movies and it needs to be done in 6 months because we messed up the previous director and already planned on a specific release date."
All they had to do was put Peter Jackson on it, step back and support him until it was done. The Hobbit movies would have been masterpieces
There's reason why this section of the book wasn't adapted the first go around.
So while I don't doubt that Colbert is an LOTR super fan with excellent writing credentials, I have serious doubts that can make up for the deficiencies in the source material they are adapting.
The Gollum movie looks like shit and The Hobbit movies were shit.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that this movie will hue closer to the quality of The Hobbit adaptations than than to the original LOTR trilogy.
Oh and making this a father-son nepo project doesn't help boost my confidence either.
I'll say it. The Hobbit movies are better than the book. Tons of fighting, no stupid weird Tom bomdewhatever. I read the book after the movies and lost my damn mind when Bilbo got knocked out for the entire final battle. How fucking dumb. How contrived.
You couldn't pay me to watch that.
Everything Colbert does fucking annoys me after that disaster of an Obama interview. Too soon.
is tentatively called The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past. It’s set 14 years after The Return of the King and is inspired by the fact Peter Jackson’s movies skipped some early chapters in The Fellowship of the Ring. “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,” the original press release said. It’s not confirmed, but the assumption is Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd would reprise their roles as Sam, Merry, and Pippin.
So it's about after the books, like an epilogue
Oh yuck. That does not sound very interesting.
I mean...
It's one of the few time periods we don't know a lot about, and it still has OG charecters.
Like, no matter what they do with it, it'll be almost impossible to fuck up anything important. It's a great stage for smaller stories in a larger established and insanely popular world.
It'll probably be pretty good. But I first read the books in elementary school long before anything but the cracked out cartoon (I still haven't seen that). So I'm a pretty big nerd about this stuff, this is better than just rebooting it all again. It's something we haven't seen/read anywhere else before really.
Philippa Boyens is working on it, so the writing won't be the problem. She was responsible for some impeccable writing on LotR. But she was also a writer on The Hobbit and look how that turned out.
Right; the difference was studio pressure and timelines. Boyens and Jackson could take their time with LotR (pre-production was what, seven years?), while they were piled on to turn two films into three for the Hobbit, and to turn them around in no time at all comparatively.
The whole idea of turning The Hobbit into a trilogy was dumb from the start. They could have made one good movie instead.
Honestly? I'm fine with him doing LotRverse stuff, but I really wanted to see what he was going to do with The Chronicles of Amber.
I trust Stephen Colbert with Lord of the Rings more than I trust that when I jump I'll fall back down. Anyone else involved in the project however...