By We've got a little bit more info about Amazon's Lord of the Rings series - you know, the one that'll cost them $1 billion to make. A BILLION DOLLARS.
Anyway: according to Hollywood Reporter it's going to run across at least five seasons - which seems like the minimum return you'd want on literally a billion dollars - and one fan site is reporting that the first of those will focus on Aragorn, who was played by Viggo Mortensen in the films.
There's a lot of material in the gargantuan JRR Tolkien library, which Amazon have bought the rights to, to get stuck into with a story about a young Aragorn, so it'd make sense for things to start there. He had loads of different aliases for the writers to explore, and has a hand in the political machinations of a lot of the places which turn up in Jackson's trilogy.
So what else do we know? It's not going to retell the story we've already seen in Peter Jackson's film trilogy. Rather, it'll be a sort of prequel to those events, and as it's being made in conjunction with the Tolkien Estate it won't wander too far from anything Tolkien actually wrote about.
There's nothing out so far about casting, but Sir Ian McKellen's keen to reprise Gandalf again. When he was asked about it on Graham Norton's Radio 2 show in December, he said: "Are you suggesting that someone else is going to play it? Gandalf is over 7,000 years old, so I’m not too old."
Andy Serkis and John Rhys Davis have both counted themselves out of returning as Gollum and Gimli respectively, though.
