Stephen Colbert will be all done with CBS when The Late Show wraps up in May. So where’s he going next? Ironically, to Warner Bros., which just got bought by Paramount/Skydance, owners of CBS. However, the project is completely out of left field, as Colbert will be developing a new Lord of the Rings movie alongside his son, screenwriter Peter McGee.
Titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, the film was announced by Peter Jackson over social media. Colbert joined Jackson on a video call, which is when he revealed that the plot of the new film will be taken from chapters of JRR Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 movie.
Colbert said, “You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me. But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [‘The Fellowship of the Ring’] that ya’ll never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three is Company’ [Chapter III] through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’ [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
Working alongside Colbert and McGee on the script is screenwriter Philippa Boyens, a writer on all of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies as well as the animated War of the Rohirrim from 2024.
Here’s the official synopsis for Shadows of the Past: “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo – 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.”
Colbert is a true Tolkien fanatic, and has worked with Jackson in the past. He had a small role in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and also directed the Middle-Earth short film Darrylgorn, featuring much of the LOTR cast.
Before Colbert’s movie arrives, Andy Serkis’ The Hunt for Gollum will hit theaters on December 17th 2027.
