Stephen Colbert has lined up his next job after finishing up as host of The Late Show in May: writing a new Lord of the Rings film tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.

Film-maker Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy, made the surprise announcement in a video on social media on Tuesday. Colbert is an avid, lifelong JRR Tolkien fan and even had a small cameo in Jackson’s 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug alongside his wife and children.

Deadline reported the film will be titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past and will be written by Colbert, Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile Sam’s daughter, Elanor, discovers “a long-buried secret that explains why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began”.

In a video with Jackson, Colbert said he was inspired to develop a story after rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, and thinking about chapters three to eight, which were not included in Jackson’s film adaptation.

“You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me, but the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in the Fellowship that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day,” Colbert told Jackson.

“I thought, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies?”

Colbert said he then planned an outline for the story with his son, the screenwriter Peter Colbert.

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“It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it … and I could not be happier that [Warner Bros.] loved it,” Colbert told Jackson.

Jackson joked that Colbert would have to find time to adapt the film, in reference to the highly contentious cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show, which Colbert has hosted since 2015. The cancellation was criticised as politically motivated, coming just after Colbert criticised CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for making a $16m settlement with Donald Trump, who has been vocal about his dislike for Colbert.

In response, Colbert said: “It turns out I’m going to be free starting this summer”, to which Jackson replied: “Isn’t that fortunate?”

The film will be produced by Jackson along with the franchise’s longtime producers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh.

Colbert’s film is the second upcoming film in Tolkien’s universe. Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is set to be released 17 December 2027, will be directed by Gollum himself – Andy Serkis – and will follow Aragorn on his quest to capture Gollum during the time period between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, in order to keep the ring from Sauron.

The six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have grossed a combined US$5.9bn.

Elijah Wood has said that his salary for The Lord of the Rings movies was “not massive” and that appearing in the films was “a real gamble”.

According to a report in Business Insider, which carried quotes from the star at the Texas film awards in March, Wood said the fact that the actors had to sign up for all three films at the start meant that their fees were not related to the film’s financial success. “Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life.”

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson and adapted from the epic novels by JRR Tolkien, said the actors understood the significance of the project. “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives for ever.”

It has been previously suggested that Wood earned about $250,000 (£190,000) for the first film, but the actor told Business Insider that this figure was not accurate and that “it doesn’t matter”.

The size of the fees paid to the cast of The Lord of the Rings compared to stars of other Hollywood movies has often been noted, with Cate Blanchett, who played the elf Galadriel in the series, saying on the Watch What Happens Live talk show in 2024 that she “basically got free sandwiches” and “no one got paid anything”. Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas, said in 2019 that he had been paid $175,000 for all three films, while Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) said he got $250,000.

Released between 2001 and 2003, Jackson’s three-film series grossed $2.96bn at the worldwide box office, with a reported budget of $281m.

A Lord of the Rings fanfiction writer has lost a copyright lawsuit over the publication of his own sequel to the much-loved series after opening up a counterproductive legal battle against JRR Tolkien’s estate.

The US-based author Demetrious Polychron published what he described as the “pitch-perfect” Lord of the Rings follow-up in 2022, titled The Fellowship of the King. He planned for the book to be the first of a seven-part series inspired by the franchise.

But the following April, Polychron attempted to sue the Tolkien estate and Amazon over the spin-off TV series The Rings of Power, which he claimed infringed the copyright in his book. A California court dismissed the case after the judge ruled that Polychron’s text was, in fact, infringing on Amazon’s prequel, released in September 2022.

The Tolkien estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron for all physical and digital copies of The Fellowship of the King to be destroyed, as well as a permanent injunction to prevent any of the fanfiction series from being further distributed.

The US court also awarded lawyers’ fees totalling $134,000 (£106,000) to the Tolkien estate and Amazon in connection with Polychron’s lawsuit.

Making the order, Judge Wilson referred to Polychron’s original claim for copyright protection as “unreasonable” and “frivolous” given that his work is entirely based on characters in The Lord of the Rings.

The estate’s UK solicitor, Steven Maier of Maier Blackburn, said: “This is an important success for the Tolkien estate, which will not permit unauthorised authors and publishers to monetise JRR Tolkien’s much-loved works in this way.

“This case involved a serious infringement of The Lord of the Rings copyright, undertaken on a commercial basis, and the estate hopes that the award of a permanent injunction and attorneys’ fees will be sufficient to dissuade others who may have similar intentions.”