Shadow of the Past
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The new film will be produced by WingNut Films in association with Spartina Industries and written by Phillipa Boyens, Peter McGee, and Tolkien superfan Stephen Colbert. It is set 14 years after the climax of Return of the King and Frodo’s passage into the West for his role in bearing the One Ring to Mordor.
Shadow of the Past will see Sam, Merry, and Pippin reunite to “retrace the first steps of their adventure,” according to a press release provided by Warner Bros., while Sam’s daughter, Elanor, goes on an unlikely quest of her own—uncovering a long-lost secret about the early days of the War of the Ring that almost saw the mission to destroy the One Ring doomed before it even really began.
According to Colbert in a new interview shared by Warner Bros., he developed the idea—inspired by five chapters from Fellowship of the Ring not covered in Jackson’s movie, where the Hobbits encounter the mysterious Tom Bombadil while fleeing the Black Riders—two years ago with his son, adding to Jackson that it “took a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call… you liked it enough to talk to me about it.” Colbert initially did not plan on helping to write the script until the end of his time on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was announced last year, paving the way for him to begin working on the project in earnest this summer.
No details on casting for Shadow of the Past were confirmed, but given the framing device, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Warner Bros. attempt to bring back Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd to reprise their roles as Sam, Merry, and Pippin, respectively.
Lots of feels here… One thing that I like about this is the prospect of bringing back key members of the Fellowship without using clunky de-aging technology. Moreover, the plan seems to be hinting that we’re going to get some Tom Bombadil content with (potentially) an appearance by a barrow wight… which would of course be awfully interesting. But of course it’s also an exercise in nostalgia mining and IP generation, and those efforts have not gone particularly well with this franchise since 2003. I mean, I hope it’ll be good but I’ll quite likely watch it either way. Colbert obviously has a deep love of the material but I don’t know that we have any reason to believe one way or another that he’s capable of putting together a full length film script.
With respect to Abigail’s latest... I recently watched some Reel or another which argued that Middle Earth in the late Third Age is best described as a post-apocalyptic world, in which case it makes sense that groups of different races have effectively closed themselves off, Mad Max-style, in an effort to protect themselves from a collapsing social order. This interpretation isn’t novel, and some of the comments on Abigail’s post get at elements of it, but it’s worth recapping briefly; LOTR happens in a world that has been thrice ruined, and the wreckage of that ruin dots the landscape in the same way that crashed rigs and broken airplanes dot the landscape of post-apocalyptic Australia. That the residents of the Shire are barely aware of this ruin is a credit to the Rangers who protect their borders, but the insular cultural tendencies of those residents is a coping mechanism for living in a world that has been repeatedly destroyed and that appears to be getting worse every time. In Star Wars the fact that the Sequel Trilogy basically undoes all of the victories of the Original Trilogy is depressing (if realistic), but LOTR effectively starts not just with the rise of the Empire or the First Order, but effectively with the successors (Second or Third Order, depending on how you count) of those catastrophes. Since all of that happens offscreen it makes “Somehow Sauron returned” go down a bit easier…