Why Isn’t The Silmarillion Being Made Into a Movie or Radio Show?

Q: Why Isn’t The Silmarillion Being Made Into a Movie or Radio Show?

ANSWER: J.R.R. Tolkien only sold the film and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Since The Silmarillion was not published until 4 years after his death, he could not have negotiated any sort of rights release for that book.

Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate have steadfastly refused to sell film rights to The Silmarillion, which in my own opinion would probably not be adapted to film, stage, or radio as well as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have been. UPDATE: Rumors of a Silmarillion movie have been circulating on the Web because of an old April Fool’s joke from the mid-2000s. Do not believe the rumors. There is NO “Silmarillion” movie on the way.

Conceivably the constituent tales of The Silmarilion could provide plots for many movies, especially for “Beren and Luthien”, “Turin Turambar”, “Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin”, “Eärendil and Elwing”, and many other great stories that are given less attention. I could easily imagine an entire body of movies based on the Tolkien stories, but that might seem like a nightmare to members of the Tolkien family. I cannot speak for them.

The fact that Peter Jackson has liberally drawn upon material in the appendices to flesh out his vision of Middle-earth might one day inspire someone to approach the Saul Zaentz Company with a proposal to make a movie about one of the incidental stories from The Lord of the Rings. Films such as “Born of Hope” and “The Hunt for Gollum” make it clear that such stories can be successfully developed into engaging movie projects.

But while there is plenty of material to feed a screenwriter’s imagination in the LoTR appendices, it might be impractical to consider licensing a movie about the First Age of Middle-earth. There is so little information about that time in The Lord of the Rings that any such movie — based on existing rights agreements — would have to create an almost entirely new Middle-earth. At least Peter Jackson’s scaled-down Middle-earth bears strong resemblances to Tolkien’s world on many points.

Many fans do not seem to be aware of the fact that Peter Jackson is not legally permitted to use material from other books such as The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, or even The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Road Goes Ever On. And all the information published in The History of Middle-earth and The History of The Hobbit is equally off-limits. This much was made very clear to me by the people at Weta who asked me to help them with research for the “Lord of the Rings” movies.

Unless something changes with the Tolkien family’s position on the matter, fans will have to wait for these other works to go into the public domain before people can really begin to mine them for cinematic adaptation. Under current U.S. law that means nothing will be available until 75 years after Christopher Tolkien’s death. That’s time enough for people to think about how they might adapt a story as complex and sophisticated as The Silmarillion. Maybe.

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