Elijah Wood's Frodo Update is the Last Nail in the Coffin of LotR Magic
The Lord of the Rings franchise has found a new life recently – or, if you will, has been revived as an undead mockery of itself, to squeeze some more money out of the audience.
The Rings of Power series of Amazon has been controversial to put it mildly. And while so far there is little information about the plans for new LotR movies, currently concocted by Warner Bros., and we cannot even tell for sure whether they are going to reboot Peter Jackson's original trilogy or to create some sort of "Middle-earth cinematic universe", initial signs are not looking good.
What we do know is that Elijah Wood, who played Frodo in The Lord of the Rings movies (and briefly returned for a cameo appearance in The Hobbit's trilogy) has recently been asked about whether he might be up to playing Frodo again in those new movies.
And he answered: "Reboot… I don't know about that, but if there's more films that potentially involve Frodo, I would be down."
Besides confirming that no one yet knows what the new movies are actually going to be, this is more than a bit depressing.
For any faults it may have, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is remembered for its unique cinematic magic, which impacted many aspects of culture, from any subsequent fantasy movies to Internet memes. Yes, we can tell ourselves that we can always just disassociate any new productions of Warner Bros. from Jackson's movies in our minds. But would that be an easy feat, if they're going to make Elijah Wood return as Frodo in the new movies, ruining the sad scene of his departure from Middle-earth in RotK's finale one way or another?
And make no mistake, the producers are very likely to do so, just like they've hired him for The Hobbit's cameo, which added nothing to the story besides a "remember those other, better movies" wink at the audience.
In fact, The Hobbit trilogy, although not completely devoid of merit, was the first sign that Tolkien's fears are coming true.
We all know that a fairly thin book was stretched to an adaptation of about the same length as Jackson's first trilogy, with resulting production troubles, including the change of directors, for no better reasons than to make us pay for theatre tickets three times, instead of one or two.
And there is little reason to expect that any new movies would be treated any better.