Ian McKellan has been asked to return as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.
The famed actor told Big Issue that Warner Bros. is not only putting Gandalf in its 2026 film, obviously centred around Gollum, but that it wants him to return to the iconic role for a third time.
"I’ve just been told there are going to be more films and Gandalf will be involved and they hope that I’ll be playing him," McKellen said. "When? I don’t know. What the script is? It’s not written yet. So they better be quick."
The 85-year-old actor previously said he'd be open to returning as Gandalf so long as age didn't catch up to him, and Warner Bros. has said itself characters from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies may return.
Now it seems certain that Gandalf will star in the film, though as McKellen notes, there still isn't a script put together. The Hunt for Gollum was announced on May 9, 2024 when an early version was being worked on, but star Andy Serkis said discussions only began around October 2023.
"They were saying, ‘Andy, we really want to reinvigorate Middle-earth. There are so many fresh stories that we want to get involved with. We want to launch this new wave by taking us back into the world of Gollum.' They asked me to direct," Serkis said in June. "This is a dream come true, to work with the people I love working with in a country I adore working in."
Comments about reinvigorating Middle-earth are a tad more sentimental than the language used by those who own the Lord of the Rings franchise. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslaz said, for example, said The Lord of the Rings is a "largely underused" franchise that his company is "hard at work fixing." CEO of The Lord of the Rings owner Embracer Group Lars Wingefors, meanwhile, said the company needs to be "exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion" on the video game front.
Regardless, 65-year-old Aragorn actor Viggo Mortensen is also open to returning, but it's unclear if he's been asked yet. Mortensen said he'd only star in The Hunt for Gollum if it makes sense for him and his character, however.
The Lord of the Rings was once a standalone trilogy but the canonical film universe is slowly but surely expanding, first through The Hobbit Trilogy and now through several other films and TV shows.
Amazon has continued the franchise with its The Rings of Power TV show, Season 1 of which released in 2022 on Prime Video. Season 2 kicked off in August and, in February 2024, showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne extended their partnership with Amazon and signed a new three-year deal with the company to kick off early work on Season 3.
Elsewhere in Tolkien's world sits The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated film set to tell the story behind the fortress of Helm's Deep and the mighty King of Rohan Helm Hammerhand when it premieres on December 13, 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
