Lord Of The Rings Gollum Fan Film Banned By Warner Bros. After 15 Years Online

We’d like to say that this hasn’t happened before, but we’re not really living in the ideal world, and WB had the fan-made The Hunt for the Gollum taken off the YouTube content platform on copyright grounds. It’s more than likely that the 15-year-old fan film contained the same story concept that’s currently fueling the new project under the leadership of Peter Jackson and his fellow writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who had worked with him on the previous projects related to the LotR franchise.

A fan-made version of The Hunt for Gollum was directed by Chris Bouchard as a rather ambitious project that spanned 39 minutes of view time. It received plenty of praise upon its release and 13 million views before WB had it removed from the Internet’s most prominent content platform—that’s 13 million die-hard LotR fans waiting for the movie to release. The fan-made project even opens up with a message that seemingly tried to ward off a copyright takedown request by stating its non-profit nature.

The narrative of the fan-made The Hunt for Gollum is set during the opening act, The Fellowship of the Ring, and filled in a quest that was only briefly discussed by the same-name movie. As per the story, Gandalf asks Aragorn to hunt for Gollum to find out more about Frodo’s magic ring, so the Strider embarks on a series of adventures and eventually traps and loses Gollum whilst also being hunted by orcs and Ringwraiths. Gollum is then captured by the Elves of Mirkwood and eventually interrogated by Gandalf.

As per our previous report, English actor and filmmaker Andy Serkis, who portrayed Gollum in the franchise’s previous iterations, is still connected to the franchise. This time, however, he’s not only reprising his role as Gollum/Smeagol, but he’s also on board to direct the upcoming The Hunt for Gollum. Gollum is actually the ideal supporting character of the entire franchise; he’s both amusing and detestable and influences the overarching narrative quite a bit until he finally meets his demise at Mount Doom.

If the upcoming The Hunt for Gollum really contains story elements similar to those from the fan-made movie, the upcoming film won’t actually focus as much on Gollum as a lead character but rather a supporting character he had always been. It’s actually much more likely for the upcoming movie to focus on Aragorn (hopefully Viggo Mortensen, if they manage to de-age him) as a lead character, with Gandalf and Gollum taking the back seat. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for 2026 to find out.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter