During the 2022 Super Bowl, the trailer was released for Amazon’s epically expensive Lord of the Rings TV series, which is set to make its grand debut on September 2, 2022.
Now, we have more news about the future of the LOTR franchise with the revelation that Warner Bros. Animation and New Line’s anime stand-alone The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will arrive in cinemas on April 12, 2024.
The anime feature will focus on Helm’s Deep, which you might remember as being the fortress at the centre of the battle in The Two Towers. The plot of the new feature will be set a few hundred years before the second instalment in the trilogy and will explore Helm’s Deep’s backstory by way of the life of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the king of Rohan.
Kenji Kamiyama, who has helmed films such as Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, is directing.
In a joint statement made at the time of the film’s announcement, executives from both New Line and Warner Bros. spoke of their excitement for the feature saying, “Fans know Helm’s Deep as the stage for one of the greatest battles ever put to film and, with many of the same creative visionaries involved and the brilliant Kenji Kamiyama at the helm, we couldn’t be more excited to deliver a fresh vision of its history that will invite global audiences to experience the rich, complex saga of Middle-earth in a thrilling new way.”
It’s likely that New Line Cinema is hoping to stir up similar success to that it enjoyed when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released. That first film made USD $880 million worldwide in its initial release, making it the second highest-grossing film of 2001 and the fifth highest-grossing film of all time at the time of its debut.
The third film in the trilogy, Jackson’s Return of the King, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, just one of 17 Oscars earned by the three films collectively. The trilogy also earned a combined USD $2.9 billion upon initial release, with Jackson returning to direct a prequel trilogy based on Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit.
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