The Lord of the Rings Team Didn’t Want to Make New Live-Action Movies, Until They Made the Anime

The Hobbit only seemed to be the end. The Oscar-winning team of director Peter Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens had spent almost two decades making movies in Middle-earth and they were ready to give it a rest. But now we know that world is returning, first as an anime and then as a live-action film. Turns out though, a live-action film was never in the cards, until they got to work on the anime.

On December 13, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim hits theaters. Set about 200 years before the events of The Hobbit, it follows a princess of Rohan named Hera who is forced to deal with a siege that puts her entire family in jeopardy. The film is based on a story from the appendices of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works; it’s standalone and features almost all new characters—but is very much in the language and tone of the original films. Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) directs while Boyens, Jackson, and Walsh produce.

io9 sat down with Boyens over video chat recently, and she explained that it was Warner Bros. that came to them about making the film. “Warner Bros came to us in about 2019 and they asked the question whether we’d have any interest in going back to the world with an animated film,” Boyens said. “I think they knew enough to not ask us to do a live-action film because we were definitely not there yet then.”

But, of course, we know they are there now. Earlier this year, Warner Bros. announced that Andy Serkis would be directing a film about the hunt for Gollum which takes place in the same time frame as The Fellowship of the Ring and will, of course, feature characters from those films. Going off Boyens’ 2019 skepticism about returning to live-action Lord of the Rings movies, we asked what it was about making The War of the Rohirrim that gave them the confidence to go back to Middle-earth.

“It was falling back in love with it, to be honest,” she said. “It was feeling like, ‘Oh, maybe there is some more story there to tell.’ And also was starting to feel a bit of an appetite for it. I don’t know whether it was because of covid or post-covid but I think a lot of people returned to those films during covid, to be quite honest with you. And we started getting that uptick in people writing to you, all of that sort of stuff. And it felt appropriate. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I don’t know what it is. Because really you are always dependent on the audience, and it’s exactly the way it should be. We should be making these films for people to enjoy. And the best way to do that is to know that there’s an audience out there for them. So let’s see. Let’s see what happens.”

We’ll see what happens next week when Middle-earth returns to the big screen with The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Check back soon for more from our interview with Boyens.

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