Warner Bros. has just announced a new partnership with Embracer Group and New Line Cinema that allows them to develop several new Lord of the Rings films. While we don’t necessarily find the prospects of another Tolkien adaptation appealing after the disastrous release of Amazon Prime’s The Rings of Power, the fans might find it in themselves to get behind this new project if their favorite Middle-earth creator is attached to the project.
We’re talking, of course, about the man, the myth, the legend, Peter Jackson. The Kiwi director who did the impossible two decades ago by bringing The Lord of the Rings to life in a way that few literary adaptations in history have managed to imitate.
Even after all these years, The Fellowship of the Ring remains one of the best fantasy movies of all time, and The Two Towers or The Return of the King aren’t far behind that appraisal. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a legacy film series, so confident in its storytelling and so bold in its technical initiatives that people now put it upon a pedestal, to be revered from afar, a high bar that would take nothing short of a miracle to match.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons The Rings of Power failed, as people subconsciously pitted it against Peter Jackson’s grand achievement. The Lord of the Rings is beloved to such an extent that even Jackson himself couldn’t defeat it with The Hobbit trilogy a decade later, but at the same time, none of us would mind it if the director returned for another Middle-earth outing, especially if the industry moguls are willing to go ahead without him and make the film anyway.
The more important question is if Jackson himself would be down for a return. So, where does the Academy Award-winning director stand in all of this?
Peter Jackson is collaborating with New Line, but a proper return is doubtful
Following the announcement that more Lord of the Rings movies are on the way, Jackson and his partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens said that the company has kept them “in the loop every step of the way” and they’re looking forward to “hearing their vision for the franchise moving forward.”
That doesn’t necessarily confirm Peter Jackson is going to be a part of this new project, let alone direct it, but it does indicate that New Line wishes to keep the creative around and use his expansive breadth of Middle-earth experience and expertise to develop a project in the vein of those two previous trilogies.
From a logical standpoint, every movie Warner Bros. and New Line develop in Middle-earth will inevitably share continuity with Jackson’s timeline. The upcoming anime feature, War of the Rohirrim, is just one indicator of why the company can’t deviate from the filmmaker’s visual language, and not just due to Miranda Otto’s return as Eowyn. The studio simply can’t make everything from scratch because Jackson’s work on the two trilogies already covered all the bases, worldbuilding and lore-wise.
Now, unless they’re planning to adapt The Silmarillion, which sounds highly unlikely, this puts their work in the Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth yet again, which essentially means we’re going to be revisiting the world we’ve grown to love over the past two decades.
When you think about it, even Amazon’s The Rings of Power imitated the trilogy, perhaps to avoid alienating the audience any further. Why would they bring back creatives like John Howe and Howard Shore, otherwise? Whatever Warner Bros. and Embracer are cooking behind the scenes, it has to be somewhere in Jackson’s established domain, and even that isn’t guaranteed to justify it for diehard Tolkien gatekeepers.
The only reason Jackson acquiesced to The Hobbit was that Guillermo del Toro, the man who worked on the adaptation for two years, decided to call it quits mere weeks before shooting, compelling the Kiwi filmmaker to come out of his retirement and bear this burden for another couple of years. And we all know what became of that particular trilogy, though most of us would sooner forget that it exists.
With all of that in mind, it’s highly unlikely for Jackson to helm another Middle-earth project. The last two trilogies ground the filmmaker’s creative juices to their breaking point, and he himself has made it clear that he doesn’t want to have a hand in Tolkien’s world anymore, opting instead to watch it as just another fan.