Stephen Colbert Was Fired. Now He’s Trying to Ruin Middle-earth.

It’s an irrefutable fact that Hollywood films are, at this point, a cesspool of leftist propaganda.

There are the girl-boss princesses, unrealistic superhero women, the obligatory lesbian kiss in kids’ movies, gay storylines, and ideological screenwriting. We’ve had decades of it — and despite abysmal box-office numbers and television ratings, the bad storytelling has persisted.

But for all its faults, Hollywood occasionally betrays a conservative bent.

To be clear, it’s not that the film industry is interested in promoting conservative principles like heroic faith in God or manly fatherhood and family leadership, although such things do make for the kind of stories we all love. Instead, it adopts that most basic and, quite possibly, least important principle of conservatism: It seeks to conserve something from the past and extend it through thick and thin, usually without ever considering whether doing so is actually good for anyone so long as it benefits filmmakers’ pocketbooks. (READ MORE: When the Legends Die — Chuck Norris)

The examples of this base form of storytelling conservatism abound. Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are constantly added to via a never-ending stream of television shows nobody watches (unless they’re bored out of their minds, an affliction that much of the modern world suffers from); Toy Story has so many sequels it’s become a bit absurd; C. S. Lewis’s Narnia is in for another remake courtesy of Greta Gerwig; and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is about to be revisited by none other than Stephen Colbert.

You see, Colbert will be out of a job in May.

That’s old news. Paramount announced that his late-night TV gig would be coming to an end last year, citing “financial” reasons. In an age when just about anybody can turn on a camera and lecture the American public with very little overhead, spending $100 million on Colbert’s opinions and a collection of sofa interviews seems like a bad business decision. It was. Even though the show got the highest ratings in the business, Paramount was reportedly losing some $40 million a year on it. 

So Colbert did what any of us would do if we found ourselves kicked out of an industry that was rapidly falling apart — he decided to get into the movie business. As something of a Lord of the Rings fanboy, he called up his son, Peter McGee, with a proposal for a script based on the epic modern tale. Then, this week, he and Peter Jackson put together a rather awkward Instagram reel announcing that they would be collaborating on a brand new film to add to what’s turning into a Middle-earth cinematic universe. 

Jackson was the director of the original trilogy and his most recent project is a fan-fiction film entitled The Hunt for Gollum, set to be released in 2027. Before that’s done, he and Colbert will be working on finalizing a script meant to explore the six chapters of the Fellowship of the Ring that Jackson skipped over in his original 2001 rendition of the book. 

“I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’” Colbert told Jackson.

The answer, Colbert, is no.

Especially not given the current logline of the film, which runs, “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”

What kind of premise is that? Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that the hobbits who traveled with Frodo — who proved themselves perhaps the least prone to drama of any character on the trip — are dead set on uncovering past wrongs and quibbles.. And might I suggest that the reason the “War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began” was simply because it is always difficult to do the right thing in the face of great evil — something Colbert, Jackson, and McGee would be aware of if they ever spent time reading fairy tales for fun. (READ MORE: When Hollywood Made Great Epic Films)

But there’s a broader problem with the film (and its predecessor-in-progress, The Hunt for Gollum), namely, it is creating a cinematic universe out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. 

Hollywood likes its cinematic universe, for obvious reasons. From a financial perspective, it’s much easier to sell audiences a film set in a world they already know and love than to introduce them to an entirely new universe and persuade them that it’s also lovable. This kind of recycling allows for faster scriptwriting and cuts down on production costs (after all, somebody already designed Middle-earth; now they just have to reuse the design). 

But the cost to the men inside the film industry and to society is immense. Hollywood has lost its ability to tell a story and, in doing so, has forgotten what it means to be a “sub-creator” (to use a turn of phrase employed by Tolkien himself.) Our identity as sub-creators is, as it happens, an important reflection of an aspect of our nature — it is, at least in part, sub-creation which makes man like the great Creator.

And so Hollywood has become stagnant. It no longer creates stories. Instead, it merely comments on the great tales once woven by men wiser than we are— and it does a bad job at even that.

READ MORE by Aubrey Harris:

The Horrific Legacy of Paul Ehrlich

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