LOTR anime prequel movie in the works

[Eldy Dunami]

‘Lord of the Rings’ Anime Movie in the Works From New Line, Warner Bros. Animation – THR

To be titled The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Based on the story of Helm Hammerhand, which is recounted in Appendix A. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama (GITS: SAC, Moribito, Eden of the East); Philippa Boyens is a consultant. It's a movie, not a series—Warner Bros/New Line don't have the rights to make a TV series based on LOTR (those were licensed by the Estate to Amazon in 2017). While it's officially a WB production and the screenwriters are based in the US, it will be animated by Sola Entertainment, a Japanese studio best known for their (somewhat polarizing) 3D computer-generated style, though they've also assisted with a few traditional, 2D, hand-drawn anime series by other studios. I'm not sure which style this will be, but Kamiyama's recent collaborations with Sola have all been 3DCG, so that seems like a decent bet.

[The Elf Imperishable]

This could be one of the animes where the English Dub is better than the Japanese dub. Just a hunch though.

[Raisins]

I am sort of interested in this I don't think there as been any LOTR based animations in a very very long time, some of the older ones were considered masterpieces (one was not but that's generally because it was found to basically have a near impossible task) My only concern is that this may be New Line attempting to cash in on the hype of the new Amazon series.

As well as possibly seeing if they can do better than the hobbit (which did slightly less in the box office than LOTR while having 3 times the budget of LOTR) in terms of income. I'm interested to see how it performs as a single stand alone movie that is going to be released in theatres also very much hoping for its sake that it is far enough in the future that covid isn't something that will have a major effect on it.

[Mattie]

This is an exciting announcement. I hope they don't give Helm Hammerhand a literal hammer (Thor-style) like they did with the statue of him at Helm's Deep in 'The Two Towers' film. This would ruin the whole hammerhand concept, his character, and the entire story.