Here’s something you probably don’t realize about how Hollywood works. I know I wasn’t familiar with it. But it turns out that, for some of the biggest franchises in the industry, studios often sign “use-it-or-lose-it agreements.” What this means is that they buy the rights to a franchise for a certain number of years. But if they fail to make any progress towards making a film after a while, then they run the risk of losing the rights entirely. So studios can’t buy the rights to a major franchise, and then take a long time figuring out what kind of movie they’re going to make. They’re under pressure to produce content quickly. For “Spider-Man,” for example, Sony committed to begin production on new films within “3 years and 9 months of their last release, and they must get it into theaters within 5 years and 9 months of their last release.” This has been standard in the industry for a long time. The very first film adaptation of “The Hobbit” was made in 1967. The film was just 12 minutes long, and was produced in less than a month. Source: RembrantFilms/YouTube.com You can see the quality of the animation, or lack thereof. It’s really just a few drawings that the camera zooms in on. The only reason for the film’s existence was to allow the producer to keep the license to “The Lord of the Rings,” so that he could sell it back to the Tolkien estate for a $100,000 profit. So he scrambled to put together this atrocious production — where the One Ring doesn’t even do anything, and the animation doesn’t animate — in order to hold onto the rights. More recently, New Line Cinema acquired the rights to the film adaptations of “The Lord of the Rings” — and it cost them a lot more than $100,000. But the same general rule applies to New Line Cinema: New Line is compelled to pump out new “Lord of the Rings” content, or else they’ll lose the deal. It doesn’t matter how bad or pointless the content may be. They’re contractually forced to have something in motion. That’s why, in 2024, something called “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” was released. You’ve probably never heard of this film. Apparently it was some kind of “anime.” Source: New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. Animation. And as you can see from this poster, the protagonist was a woman — the “fiercely independent daughter of the legendary King of Rohan.” For obvious reasons, no one watched this film. No one liked it. It wasn’t actually based on anything in the books. They took a no-name character from a footnote in an appendix of “Return of the King,” and they made her the protagonist. And they wrote a script very quickly, too. According to Variety, “The animated film was developed and fast-tracked to ensure that New Line Cinema didn’t lose the film adaptation rights for Tolkien’s novels while Jackson and the teams behind the ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Hobbit’ trilogies were working on two new live-action films for 2026 and beyond.” The first of those live-action films has been titled “The Hunt for Gollum.” It’s slated to come out next year. Everyone already knows it will be horrible, because it has no reason to exist. There’s a reason Tolkien didn’t devote much time to this particular series of events in the books — it’s simply not that interesting. It’s also a prequel with absolutely no stakes, because we all know how the story turns out. We know Gollum is captured and gets away, and then the next movie happens. But they have to make “The Hunt for Gollum,” or else they’ll lose the movie rights. They’re contractually obligated to pump this garbage out. They can’t take ten years and come up with a compelling or interesting film. They have to produce it right now. And then once they’re done with this one, they need to have a follow-up in the pipeline. The pace is relentless, by design. And here’s the key point: While the studios would prefer that the movies do well, that’s actually a secondary objective. Their primary goal is to simply get a movie out — any movie — so that they can hold onto the rights for as long as possible. And the so-called “creative team” — the writers and the executives — understand that mandate very well. They know that, when executives are desperate for a film, it’s extremely easy to inject obvious, lazy feminist propaganda into an established story. And that’s exactly what’s happening now to “The Lord of the Rings.” It was evident in that atrocious “anime” film that no one watched. And it’s especially evident in the new “Lord of the Rings” film that’s going to be written primarily by Stephen Colbert and his nepo baby son. (Which — already — gives the game away. Colbert’s only relevant experience for this gig is that he destroyed late-night television, which used to be a major part of American culture. And precisely because of that recent experience — not in spite of it — Colbert has been brought onboard to obliterate the relevance of “Lord of the Rings,” one of the great landmarks in Western literature). Watch: