News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Lord of the Rings Returns to Theaters Because It Is… 25 Years Old?! By Molly Templeton | Published on January 16, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share To put it mildly—absurdly mildly, really—this year is off to a rough start. If you want to spend your weekend lying around in soft pants and rewatching old favorites, I understand completely. But if you want to leave the house, or try something new, there are options! There are also a million options if you want to do something to help those who are suffering in this cold, icy winter. Stock up a little free pantry near your house, if there is one. Send some money to one of the many groups in Minneapolis who are working to support their neighbors—or find similar groups in your own area. It is hard to watch what’s happening in this country right now. It feels better to help, if and where you can. And, as ever, don’t forget to call your reps.  They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard: The Lord of the Rings is back in Theaters Do I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films at home on DVD? Yes. Do I still have a great desire to go see them in theaters while they’re back this week? Yes. Yes, friends, the latest return-to-cinemas release is the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Fellowship of the Ring turns 25 this year—in December, mind you—which means, I expect, that there will be a whole host of re-releases and new book editions and who knows what else. Not that I’m complaining.  The Two Towers might be my favorite of the movies—Helm’s Deep!—but I’m thinking about going to Fellowship just so I can get extremely weepy when Gandalf says the line. You know the one. The one that feels extra relevant right now? “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Sorry. Something in my eye. Perhaps a slight change in tone will alleviate the feelings I’m now having. An Anthology of Hope and Stories: We Will Rise Again Books published in December historically have it pretty rough. The year’s best-of lists have largely already happened; people are distracted by the holidays; people are distracted, period, in this particular day and age. This past December, a lot of air was taken up by a memoir—by all accounts truly terrible—that no one needs to read. So it’s entirely possible to have missed some of the month’s more interesting releases, including the all-star anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Malka Older, Annalee Newitz, and Karen Lord. This book couldn’t really be more timely. I keep thinking about the writer Karen Russell saying in essence, that at this point, everyone she knows can lie awake at 4 am and create a dystopia. It’s not hard to imagine. (I’m paraphrasing, but if you want to hear her and her fellow genius Omar El Akkad in conversation, you can listen here.) Hope is a little harder these days.  We Will Rise Again includes stories by R.B. Lemberg, Nicola Griffith, Samit Basu, N.K. Jemisin,  Izzy Wasserstein, and many more. Reactor’s Christina Orlando called it a book that “should be read by anyone who cares about the world around them and believes that sci-fi and fantasy can help us imagine real possibilities.”  There’s Coffee in that Nebula: Happy Anniversary, Star Trek: Voyager If multiple sources are to be believed, today, January 16th, is the anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager. I love this little fact, because Voyager was the first show I remember wanting to see at its premiere: A lady captain? In space? I was so excited. It’s funny to look back now and think about how young Janeway looks, even though they put Kate Mulgrew in that stodgy hairstyle to make her seem older. (Now there was a captain who had her priorities straight.) At any rate, Voyager still has its charms, and is especially relevant given that the ship’s Doctor (Robert Picardo) is now on the just-premiered Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. What’s old is new again, what goes around comes around, and if Stars both Trek and Wars are struggling in the cinematic arena, at least the shows keep coming. You can get all your Trek fixes on Paramount Plus; Voyager is also on Pluto TV. A Daily Reading Habit I did not in fact succeed at any of the reading and watching plans I had for the holidays. I didn’t go to a single movie. I am an abject failure at movies. I read entirely different books than the ones I was supposed to read, but at least one of those was fully justified: I’d gone all of 2025 without reading any poetry, somehow? So I read Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé on New Year’s Eve, and started all three of the translations of the Tao Te Ching that I somehow have in my house. (They’re by Stephen Mitchell, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ken Liu.) I’m reading one page per day, in all three versions. I’m reading these pages alongside the daily selection from John Darnielle’s This Year: 365 Songs Annotated; these things make total sense in my brain, if perhaps not everyone else’s. My point here, though, is that having a small thing that I read every day is just really, really nice. I do a lot of other reading! But these brief selections break up the day, and help cement a habit, and also the specific things I’m reading just feel good as a break from all the fiction and, let’s be honest, crap on the internet. Once I’m through the Tao Te Chings, I’ll go back to Mason Currey’s two Daily Rituals books and read an entry in each of those each day. The Darnielle will keep me company all year. Maybe there’s something you can find that’s like that. It’s fun! I promise![end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: <i>Lord of the Rings</i> Returns to Theaters Because It Is… 25 Years Old?! appeared first on Reactor.