Peter Jackson Has a Good Excuse for Not Directing the Gollum Movie

David Zaslav waltzed into Warner Bros. with his seven pairs of sunglasses and, from what I can gather, said, “What did we used to make money off of and how can we keep milking those stones?” From those, I assume, riveting conversations, we wound up with a new adaptation of the Harry Potter books via a TV show debuting this year and a proposed new series of movies based on The Lord of the Rings. While the latter has not yet seemed to develop further, we know that Peter Jackson will be involved.

That wasn’t the worst news when I first heard it. Wildly unnecessary? Sure! But, in a business now run by algorithms and risk-averse suits filled with meat puppets, this is the kind of stuff that will be greenlit, so at least we can have some reliable creative forces behind them. At the very least, I hoped that Jackson would help shepherd the project, but not end up in a situation where he’s forced to step in and direct even though he doesn’t necessarily want to. I don’t hate those Hobbit movies, but I would have much rather seen Guillermo Del Toro’s spin on them.

Now, I’m a bit more confident that Jackson will allow someone else’s interpretation of the material to take center stage. The director recently revealed during an interview at Cannes that he had toyed with the idea of directing The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, but ultimately passed in favor of Andy Serkis. “I could have directed it, but I thought, I’ve done that,” and hey, not wanting to retread ground is a pretty good reason not to return, and one that other directors may not have gone with (especially not now). Jackson also explained why Serkis is the perfect choice.

“It would be more interesting with this particular story, which takes place between Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, if Andy Serkis directed it,” he said. “It’s an internal story about Gollum’s psychology and addiction. It’s a personal story to Gollum. Andy knows this guy better than anybody. I didn’t think about me. The more exciting version of this movie is if Andy Serkis made it.” While this will still be in a style that Jackson helped craft, he also noted that he will be giving Serkis plenty of freedom to do what he wants.

I’m not the most excited to see this movie, but if it’s the last vestiges of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings universe put on the big screen before David Ellison takes over and hopefully forgets that Zaslav started developing more movies, it can just kind of exist as a last hurrah with a not-as-sexy Aragorn (unless we get that Colbert movie). And hey, it is pretty cool that Serkis will be directing the movie! I’m just going to take another sip of my coffee before I look at how his recent directorial effort is going over with folks and… oh… oh, no.