How long are you willing to wait to hear Andy Serkis do the Gollum voice again? It’s been a minute, after all; possibly so long that none of your irritating relatives have busted out their best Serkis-as-Gollum at the Thanksgiving dinner table in years. Still, are you willing to wait through all of 2025? 2026? Even more, to hear Serkis once again do that guttural coughing thing where it sounds like he’s emptying out his entire human lungs?
You’ll have to: THR reports that Serkis’ upcoming Lord Of The Rings film, The Hunt For Gollum, first announced last year, will not be arriving in theaters until December 17, 2027, having just secured that very far-off Christmas spot more than two and a half years down the line. As previously reported, Serkis will both star in and direct the film, teaming back up with Lord Of The Rings scribes Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who are writing the script with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. (Walsh and Boyens are also producing, along with Peter Jackson.) The film will adapt portions of the appendices from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings books, not unlike last year’s animated The War Of The Rohirrim, although hopefully without utterly cratering at the box office the way that blatant attempt at copyright extension did.
It’s not like we don’t know these movies take a long time to make: Jackson famously devoted a hefty fraction of his lifespan to adventuring in New Zealand to make his six Tolkien-based films. But 2027—practically 2028, really—just feels like such an insanely distant called shot to set up for a project that’s already going to face accusations of cynical cinematic necromancy. Heck, not even Marvel is aiming that far out any more. (Avengers: Secret Wars is pointing at a May 2027 release.) It just seems like such a long time to wait to find out whether audiences are excited to hear Serkis publicly de-phlegm himself all over again.
Hunt For Gollum wasn’t the only movie added to Warner Bros. Discovery’s film slate today, in any case. A new Evil Dead movie, starring Souheila Yacoub, has been set for a July 2026 release, and M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Remain, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, will hit theaters on October 23, 2026.
