We Have Proof A Gollum Movie Is A Bad Idea

When that video game was announced, fans asked the same questions then that they are now asking about the upcoming Gollum movie. What, exactly, will it be about? The game plot was basically one big flashback, allowing players to experience the story Gollum recounts to Gandalf about his misadventures in the years before he was initially captured by Aragorn

However, one of the many problems with the Gollum game is one we can only hope the upcoming movie will avoid: awful original characters. While the game would occasionally bring in familiar faces such as Shelob or the Mouth of Sauron, most of the characters players encounter are completely original. This probably won’t shock you, but those characters were pretty awful, and every interaction with them made it seem more like this game was adapted from bad LOTR fanfiction written by someone who had only read the Sparknotes for the books.

Another problem the Gollum game had that the movie must avoid at all costs is that the story felt meaningless, thanks to us already knowing the outcome of Gollum’s story. Gamers were rightfully angered that so much of the game was just crappy fetch quests, but that was largely a side effect of making the entire game flashbacks to events we already mostly know about. It’s not like Gollum is going to kill Shelob or anything, or she’s going to kill the title character, making it hard to really care about any of these events or for players to have an impact on Middle-Earth.

Ironically enough, the Gollum game also suffered from comparisons to better titles before it, and that will be the chief threat faced by the upcoming movie. Playing a stealth adventure featuring everyone’s favorite Stinker sounds good on paper, but after playing excellent games like Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the poor stealth mechanics and awful graphics of Gollum negatively stood out that much more. It’s entirely possible that the Gollum movie will be better than the controversial Rings of Power show, but like the game, it may suffer from comparisons to the original trilogy of films.

It certainly sounds like Warner Bros. is throwing plenty of money at the Gollum movie, and that alone could help it look better than this misfire of a game. However, it’s worth considering that even a good budget doesn’t prevent issues like poor character design. For example, the Hobbit films had impressive budgets. However, some fans still thought the design of characters like the Goblin King was as bad as anything the Gollum game threw at us compared to the design perfection of the earlier film trilogy.

In case you were wondering how bad that Gollum game was, poor reception led Daedalic Entertainment to announce they would no longer develop new games, and they issued a lukewarm apology to players that was allegedly written by ChatGPT. After enduring that awful game and finding Rings of Power disappointing, it’s hard to hold out much hope for the Gollum movie. But as Aragorn tells Theoden, “there is always hope,” and this upcoming film may well end up blowing us away just as the original trilogy did over two decades ago.