Stephen Colbert's next act won't be behind a desk—it'll be in Middle-earth. After ending his run on CBS' The Late Show in May, Colbert will co-write a new Lord of the Rings film for New Line Cinema and Warner Bros., tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, Deadline reports. He'll script it alongside Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee, working with returning franchise heavyweights Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. "I'm pretty happy about it," the JRR Tolkien superfan tells Jackson in a video announcement, per CNN. "You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me."
Colbert says the film will draw from early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that weren't included in Jackson's original trilogy—specifically "Fog on the Barrow-downs," the eighth chapter where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin get lost in a magical fog and are captured by evil spirits known as Barrow-wights before they can be rescued by Tom Bombadil, a cult-favorite character who has yet to be seen on screen.
To fit with the existing films, Colbert's version will shift the story 14 years after Frodo's death, following Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they retrace the start of their old journey, while Sam's daughter Elanor digs into a secret tied to how close Sauron came to winning. The film will follow 2027's The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis. Colbert, who has moderated Comic-Con panels on the franchise, jokes that he finally has time for the project now that he's leaving late night. In truth, he says he first went to Jackson with the idea two years ago. Deadline notes this is "arguably his dream project."
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