{"id":761676,"date":"2026-07-14T04:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T04:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/761676\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T04:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T04:10:10","slug":"the-hunt-for-gollum-will-de-age-some-fellowship-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/761676\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hunt For Gollum will de-age some Fellowship members"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since its announcement, the upcoming Lord Of The Rings movies have been met with trepidation. It\u2019s not the fault of the films, which are still more than a year out. On one hand, there\u2019s certainly something exciting about the creative team behind the original Rings trilogy reuniting for another adventure. On the other, there\u2019s something worrying about the creative team behind the Hobbit trilogy reuniting for another adventure. We\u2019re trying to reserve judgement until we see the thing because, who knows, maybe the movie about Gandalf and Aragorn\u2019s failure to catch Gollum before Sauron will be an exciting new entry in the series. However, each announcement about the film, and its legacy sequel follow-up, has made the Black Pit in our stomachs grow deeper and darker. Unfortunately,\u00a0Hunt For Gollum\u00a0director Andy Serkis, still nursing the wounds of his non-partisan, fence-walking, ass-forward Animal Farm<\/a>, isn\u2019t helping.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a new interview with Variety<\/a>, Serkis echoed Peter Jackson\u2019s view on AI, e.g., it\u2019s a tool that can be wielded for good or ill, like a certain One Ring, according to Boromir. In Serkis\u2019 view, as long as AI isn\u2019t \u201cexploitative\u201d or \u201charming anybody\u201d or \u201ctelling mistruths,\u201d it\u2019s okay. Ignoring how things ended up for the Captain of the White Tower, Serkis is doubling down on the things that worry everyone about this new quest\u2014that its digital effects will overpower the production. Namely, bringing the original cast back for another trip to Middle-earth 25 years later will require \u201ca little bit of de-aging for some of the characters and machine learning is part of the process.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though he doesn\u2019t say which characters need de-aging (probably not Aragorn<\/a>), Serkis does bring up a form of machine learning used in the production of Lord Of The Rings, a \u201cprogram which allowed 1000s of orcs to all have their own individual mindset. So that is a brilliant example of an incredible use of AI.\u201d Which is to say, 25 years ago, when this technology wasn\u2019t being rammed down our throats, it was exciting to see Weta develop little CGI background orcs doing randomized movements. Still, the filmmaker says that there will be no \u201cAI shots\u201d in the movie and that \u201cevery shot is created in a traditional way.\u201d Serkis even hits upon something he should be talking up way more as the production gets underway: \u201cOne of the things actually that I really wanted to do with this film was to bring back all of the great filmmaking skills, from miniatures to prosthetics and marry them up, because that\u2019s my taste. I like it when you mix up different filmmaking techniques.\u201d We\u2019d like to hear more about that and much, much less about how we\u2019re going to use data sets to make Elijah Wood look 19 years old again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since its announcement, the upcoming Lord Of The Rings movies have been met with trepidation. It\u2019s not the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-761676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}