Warner Bros. announced this week that Stephen Colbert is co-developing a new Lord of the Rings film with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, and Lord of the Rings veteran Philippa Boyens. The film is titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, and it will adapt the six chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that Peter Jackson never brought to the screen — from Three is Company through Fog on the Barrow-Downs.
That means Tom Bombadil. The Old Forest. Old Man Willow. The Barrow-wights. The chapters Tolkien fans have waited over twenty years to see on screen.
The announcement came via a video from Jackson himself, who patched Colbert in via video call. “You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert told Jackson. “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.” Here’s that video:
In honor of Tolkien Reading Day and the destruction of the One Ring, we bring you a special announcement. pic.twitter.com/ufh9RLBIxO
— Warner Bros. (@warnerbros) March 25, 2026
The film’s official logline: 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’s Tolkien credentials are genuine — he’s one of the most publicly obsessive Tolkien fans alive, capable of reciting genealogies and obscure lore that most scholars would have to look up. He had a cameo in The Desolation of Smaug and co-directed the 2019 short Darrylgorn alongside Jackson, McKellen, Mortensen, and Wood. The man has spent decades proving he loves these books.
Loving books and writing films, however, are different skills. Colbert is a television host whose creative output has been defined as much by political commentary as by storytelling. His instinct to inject a political lens into his work is well-documented — and it’s a real concern when you’re handling source material that Tolkien himself was careful to keep free of allegory. “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” Tolkien wrote in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings. A filmmaker shaped by a career in political satire could do real damage to chapters that work precisely because they don’t carry a message.
That said, the bones here are strong. Boyens is writing with him — she co-wrote all three Jackson films and knows this world as well as anyone alive. Jackson is involved. And the source material, if treated faithfully, essentially writes itself. The slow dread of the Old Forest, the dream-logic of Bombadil’s house, the genuine horror of the Barrow-wight sequence — done right, this is the film many of us have wanted since 2001.
The question isn’t whether the material is worthy of the screen. It obviously is. The question is whether Colbert’s instincts as a storyteller — untested at this scale, and shaped by a career in political satire — will serve Tolkien’s world or reshape it in his own image.
