Stephen Colbert Offers a Promising Update on His ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie

I watched the fourth Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil film last night, which I was pretty excited for. While I had seen the first and third of his six movies, I’d missed the majority, and never really gave it a second thought. However, I recently learned that Anderson had sole writing credit on all six entries, despite only directing four, and that was pretty intriguing. Having essentially only one person in charge of a major franchise is no small feat and kind of rare, so I wanted to finally complete the series. I’m not sure if I’m still going to do that.

Part of the excitement was that Anderson didn’t seem to want to follow the games, which I like. I’m all for faithful adaptations, but someone taking control of the IP just to do whatever they want with it was an intriguing prospect. However, I was left just kind of bored, not seeing anything particularly special going on, on top of the whole thing not feeling at all close to the games that it was adapting (even if it did just grab random things from the source material to use as it saw fit).

Watching it partly made me understand where some Resident Evil fans are coming from when they complain that Zach Cregger is taking his own approach to the franchise. I don’t agree! The man is incredible and can be expected to deliver a solid film. But after years of not getting anything faithful, I understand their frustration. It’s also not new for a fanbase to complain about adaptations of the works they love. Hell, people even complained about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.

The fact is, fans can be very preciousssss with the things they love, even if something stellar comes down the pipeline. Now, years later, Stephen Colbert will see if he can appease that base, which he is very much a part of. The former late-night host is co-writing a new film with his son, which looks to explore some story points that Jackson left out of his movies, much to the chagrin of fans.

Fresh off of winning an Emmy last night, Colbert was asked about the progress of his new movie. “That’s what I’m doing,” he explained, via THR. “That takes a lot of time, man. You ever written a Lord of the Rings movie? It’s a full-time job.” He went on to explain that he had just been in New Zealand the day before, working on the film, and was feeling the jetlag to say the least.

LOTR fans can likely rest easy knowing that Colbert is writing this film. This isn’t a case where the person in charge just wants to use an IP to funnel their own vision. There’s certainly room for that! But it is a delicate balance to say the least. For instance, Colbert likely won’t introduce Tom Bombadil just to strap a device to him that robs him of his memories for some reason (those Resident Evil movies are… wild, y’all).