Don’t be fooled by Amazon’s extremely prolonged and exhausting rollout of information on its Lord Of The Rings prequel series The Rings Of Power, because it’s not the only Lord Of The Rings prequel thing in the works. As we learned last summer, New Line and Warner Bros. are also working on an anime prequel called The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim with director Kenji Kamiyama (who has worked on Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Netflix’s SAC_2045 reboot of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex).
Now, almost certainly because of that extremely prolonged and exhausting rollout of info on Rings Of Power, New Line and Warner have announced that The War Of The Rohirrim is coming out on April 12, 2024. That comes from Variety, which doesn’t say if that means theaters or streaming, but it would be awfully interesting if Warner Bros. gives an anime movie a wide theatrical rollout—even an anime movie based on some of the most beloved live-action movies ever made.
As for what the heck “the war of the Rohirrim” is, the story takes place a few hundred years before the events of the movies (and yes, it seems to be explicitly the movies, not the books or the complicated middle-ground/earth of the Amazon series) and focuses on Helm Hammerhand, a man with a very appropriate name for a fantasy story. It’s like that Jerry Seinfeld bit about naming your kid Jeeves, except you name your kid Helm Hammerhand. Anyway, he’s the King Of Rohan, and the anime is about him creating Helm’s Deep—the location of the big battle from The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.
Variety has a piece of concept art that looks very similar to the Peter Jackson movies, and while Jackson still is not involved, one of the writers of his movies, Philippa Boyens, is executive producing this film. Now, just like everybody who puts on The Two Towers and then has to wait for several years before The Battle Of Helm’s Deep kicks off, we have no choice but to… sit back and watch some elves do whatever they’re doing on Amazon.