Welcome to the Tolkien Cinematic Universe: what might be in the new Lord of the Rings films?

Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings. Photo / New Line Cinema

It’s the worst news to hit Middle Earth since evil wizard Saruman turned The Shire into an industrial estate at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Such has been the response of Tolkien fans to the announcement that we’re going back to the land of plucky halflings and hyper-eloquent elves for a new series of spin-off movies.

The bombshell was delivered by Warner Bros Discovery’s chief executive, David Zaslav. He revealed that the studio had entered a deal with Embracer Group, the Swedish video game conglomerate that holds the intellectual copyright to Tolkien’s most famous works. “The incomparable world of JRR Tolkien” is to return “to the big screen in new and exciting ways,” added Embracer.

The development has not gone down well. “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” wrote one aficionado on Reddit, quoting noted content creator Bilbo Baggins. “I, a person who loves Lord of the Rings, do not think we should make more Lord of the Rings movies,” agreed entertainment writer Esther Zuckerman.

You can understand the frustration. It’s nearly a decade since the conclusion of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy – the director’s deafening attempt to pump up a slight children’s novel into an eye-ball pummelling CGI extravaganza. Jackson’s reputation has only just recovered. Many Tolkien fans are still coming to terms with what he did to poor Bilbo – a travesty even allowing for the excellence of his original 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings trilogy.

It’s going to take even longer to get over Amazon’s appalling $2 billion prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings Of Power. Here, Galadriel, Queen of Lothlorian, was depicted as an emotional adolescent with anger management issues. Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, meanwhile, was a moody bit of rough who only wanted to strike his blacksmith’s hammer in peace and who finished his season one arc by audaciously trying to snog the married Galadriel.

Rings of Power’s showrunners had promised a different Middle Earth. But the show was ultimately less a spin-off than a boomeranging lurch at franchise extension which flew straight back and biffed Amazon in the eye.

Morfydd Clark as Galadrie in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Still, the biggest surprise is that anyone would be shocked at these debacles. Since the publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the saga has spawned enough garbage to fill Bag End 100 times over. How much more damage could a new batch of movies inflict on this battered corpus? After you’ve seen Sauron attempt to blag his way into the blacksmith’s guild in Númenor – a major plot point in The Rings Of Power – can you sink any lower?

The new films could, if anything, be a chance to start over. They might also finally demolish the myth that Middle Earth is a sacred fantasy realm that must be spared Hollywood deprivations.

After all, the chipping away at the reputation of The Lord of the Rings has been ongoing for decades. At the risk of being chucked off Weathertop for heresy, it started with the Tolkien Estate itself, which has been churning out indigestible extensions to the JRRT expanded universe since the Seventies.

Unfinished Tales, The Book Of Lost Tales, The Lays of Beleriand – if you’re a Tolkien fan you’ll have forked out for at least one of these books and then struggled through the lifeless prose. Consider the first paragraph in The Silmarillion, the posthumous opus which tells the story of how the elves came to be in Middle Earth.

“There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.”

Lee Child can sleep soundly, it’s safe to say.

This is not to condemn Tolkien’s son, Christopher, for toiling to bring his father’s unpublished manuscripts to the world. Their publication is, of course, entirely merited as they provide invaluable illumination into the origins of Middle Earth and the myth-making upon which Lord of the Rings was built.

Sam (Sean Astin, left) and Frodo (Elijah Wood) continue on their perilous journey to Mordor in epic adventure The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Photo / New Line Productions

The problem wasn’t that these volumes existed. It’s that they were passed off as thrilling new prequels and sequels of The Lord of the Rings. They had exciting names: The War of the Ring, The Treason Of Isengard. And they were bundled in racy cover art, featuring roaring dragons and warriors in ferocious helmets and armour.

As a Tolkien-obsessed tweenager, I vividly recall requesting for Christmas a copy of the Unfinished Tales. Upon opening it, I discovered a collection of disjointed myth cycles with none of Lord of the Ring’s immersive zing. Several stories simply stopped dead halfway through – a massive letdown, even if the book’s title ensured that nobody involved could be accused of breaching the Trade Description Act.

The scholarly value of these works was undeniable. Yet the disconnect between the exciting cover images and the stodge within arguably diminished Tolkien’s legacy – and drove readers into the pulpy arms of The Sword of Shannara and Dragonlance instead. When it comes to flogging the brand, the Tolkien Estate was doing it long before Hollywood got in on the act. We’re long past the point of being precious.

Speaking of precious, Embracer is already pushing ahead with an upcoming video game in which the player takes on the part of poor, ring-demented Gollum. What next – a board game where you play as the Black Riders and spend your time hounding Gandalf, Aragorn and the Hobbits? Well, Lord of the Rings: Nazgûl came out in 2012. So set aside the smelling salts, appalled Tolkien fans.

Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Photo / New Line Cinema

But what might the new films take in? Embracer and Warner Brothers are limited as to the sort of stories they can set in Middle-earth because the rights they own only cover The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. That’s why Amazon could separately secure permission to delve into the preceding Second Age and to adapt the appendices at the end of the Lord of the Rings (as distinct from the core story). It is also why the truly mind-bending stuff involving Sauron’s predecessor Morgoth has yet to make it to Middle-earth. His story is told in The Silmarillion – the licensing to which is still off the table.

So Embracer and Warner Brothers have got the main characters already familiar from the Jackson movies and some extraneous background details. With these limitations, we’re inevitably going to get more of our favourite heroes. An Aragorn origin story, the Gandalf equivalent of the Secrets of Dumbledore – such are options on the table. That is ironic because the Tolkien Estate was reportedly horrified at Netflix’s pitch for an Avengers-style Middle Earth saga when the trustees were flogging the rights that ultimately went to Amazon.

But would Middle-earth’s Avengers be such a bad thing? An upcoming anime-style animated movie, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, provides a glimpse of one potential future for the IP. It is set 183 years before the Riders of Rohan turn up in The Two Towers and stars Succession’s Brian Cox as legendary king Helm Hammerhand.

Aidan Turner as Kili Dwarf in The Hobbit movies.

There is potential for more of the same. An epic about, say, the adventures of dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield’s grandfather, Thrór, who battled an infestation of ice dragons – “Colddrakes” in Tolkien parlance – in the mountains north of Mirkwood. Or an Aragorn prequel in which he joins the Riders of Rohan under an assumed name and eventually becomes a Game of Thrones-style power player in the kingdom of Gondor (earning, according to Tolkien, the enduring enmity of future ruler Denethor II).

Warner could similarly explore the adventures of Gandalf and the tussles with the Necromancer – aka Sauron – that led to the discovery of the map and the key to the dwarf horde under the Lonely Mountain in the demented grip of Thorin’s mad father. It would be a sort of Star Wars: Rogue One in Middle-earth – a gritty and unflinching unpacking of the depravities of Sauron’s Mirkwood fortress of Dol Guldur.

These Middle Earth avengers would eventually have to assemble of course. A Saruman prequel, an Aragorn spin-off and a Gandalf v the Necromancer thriller could all lead up to the fateful hunt of Gollum and the events immediately preceding the Lord of the Rings (with Saruman’s betrayal threaded through). Nobody needs any of these films to exist. That isn’t to suggest that, done correctly, they might not be watchable.

A Gandalf-Aragon buddy movie could well be dreadful. But it would take a special talent to make something half as terrible as The Rings of Power. And who knows – The New Adventures of Aragorn might even be worth watching. One thing it won’t do is ruin Middle-earth for all eternity. Given all that the franchise has endured, the indestructible magic of Tolkien’s original novels has already been confirmed a hundred times over.