Although we’ve already returned to Middle Earth with the animated The War of the Rohirrim, it might be Andy Serkis’ upcoming project that many are most looking forward to. Producer Philippa Boyens recently spoke about it in an interview, comparing its tone to the second part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“I think there’s echo. There’s definitely … ‘Two Towers,’ it’s not going to be ‘Two Towers,’ but the similarities, I think, is the bridging nature of the film. ‘Two Towers’ was one of the harder films to write because it is doing that, bridging the beginning. It is the middle film. It has a quality of that to it. But one thing that we are determined to do — and a lot of this is going to have to do with Andy Serkis as a director — is we want this to be different and to feel fresh. To exist within the world that has been established, but also to be surprising. And I think what’s interesting is we are finding a lot of threads of story that are surprising in there when you really go in there and examine it. Yeah,” Boyens told SlashFilm in the interview.
One of the highlights of The Lord of the Rings films was undoubtedly the magnificent New Zealand landscapes. In the same interview, Boyens revealed that The Hunt for Gollum will showcase entirely new environments. She said, “We get to go to some places that we’ve never been before, which will be really, really, really cool.”
The War of the Rohirrim is currently in theaters, while The Hunt for Gollum is slated for release sometime in 2026.