It seems Hollywood is set on bleeding every last drop out of Tolkien’s work. I just came across this news of yet more film adaptations of Tolkien’s work, or at least films based in Middle-Earth. “Cinema is heading back to Middle-earth, with Warner Bros and New Line signing a deal to make more adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Warner Bros Discovery’s chief executive, David Zaslav, announced on Thursday on an earnings call that a deal had been brokered to make “multiple” films based on JRR Tolkien’s books.” My initial reaction upon hearing Warner were behind this was to cringe, as they are the studio behind Harry Potter and lots of other mass market dross, and I really don’t want to see Tolkien reduced to that kind of pap. Reading on, however, it seems “The films will be developed through the Warner Bros production company New Line Cinema, which produced the trilogy made by the director Peter Jackson between 2001 and 2003.” That is much, much better news: Jackson and New Line did an outstanding job with The Lord Of The Rings, and to hear they are once again at the helm is very reassuring, especially after the disaster that was Amazon’s Rings Of Power.

I still have concerns about where this will end. As I wrote here, I really don’t like seeing Tolkien reduced to yet another piece of mass market entertainment. What started with Jackson’s cinematic masterpieces, drawn as faithfully as possible from the books they were based on, is becoming more and more divergent: the two main texts have been successfully adapted to the screen; what is left of Tolkien’s writing is far more fragmentary and scholarly, and far harder to adapt. There may be many more narratives which were created by Tolkien, but I would argue that they are primarily literary, and should be allowed to remain as literature. What concerns me is that Hollywood will now get it’s hands on these stories and turn them into a nauseating mess, eager to evoke the original films at each turn, but adding nothing of worth to them while destroying the literary legacy of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

I really, really hope I’m wrong. The fact that Sir Peter Jackson is involved makes me slightly more optimistic, but I can’t see what any new film or films could possibly add. One of the greatest skills an artist can have is knowing when something is finished.