Howard Shore is returning to Middle-earth. According to Elfenomeno.com, the Canadian composer has been confirmed to score The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, Andy Serkis’s feature film slated for release December 17, 2027.
Shore composed the Oscar-winning scores for Peter Jackson’s two Middle-earth trilogies, and he wrote the main theme for Amazon’s The Rings of Power.
In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum already has his own musical identity. Shore developed specific leitmotifs for Gollum across The Two Towers and The Return of the King, threading those themes through Smeagol’s arc. For this film built around that character, from the same producer team of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, having the composer who wrote those motifs seems like a no-brainer. The last thing any fan of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies wants is somebody else borrowing Howard Shore’s themes and injecting them into a new soundtrack.
That’s exactly what happened with The War of the Rohirrim. Stephen Gallagher scored that film and referenced Shore’s existing material, but the result was by necessity a degree removed from the original work.
The film is still more than a year out, and there’s plenty we don’t know about it, including how closely it will follow Tolkien’s scattered notes about the hunt itself, which appear in the appendices to The Return of the King and are brief by any standard. Aragorn tracked Gollum for years across Wilderland; Gandalf eventually found him in the dungeons of Dol Guldur. There’s a story there, but it’s mostly outline. What Shore does with that material musically will say a lot about what kind of film Serkis is building.
We’ll be tracking this one closely on our Exploring Tolkien YouTube channel.
