Warner Bros. has released the first official photos from the set of “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum”, and the headline image is Frodo Baggins going home. He stands at the round green door of Bag End with a walking stick in his hand and his back to the camera. The studio posted the photos to TikTok for Hobbit Day on September 22nd, which is Frodo’s birthday and Bilbo’s too. So the first look at Frodo arrived on his own birthday, and it does not show his face.
The rest of the set is about the Shire itself. There are new hobbits in their Sunday clothes and some enormous pumpkins. Andy Serkis is working the cameras among the crew, which is a strange sight when you remember he is also the film’s Gollum. The caption reads: “Autumn has come to the Shire… join us as the seasons change.” It ends on the release date, December 17th, 2027. The post does not put a name on the hobbit at the door, but the curls, the stick and the door leave very little room for doubt.
These are not paparazzi shots taken from a hillside with a long lens. They came from the studio, on a date the studio picked, and that matters for how you read them. Somebody at Warner Bros. chose to release a photo of Elijah Wood as Frodo that hides Elijah Wood. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Lord of the Rings” and for where Gollum’s capture sits in Tolkien’s timeline.
So the first look at Frodo arrived on his own birthday, and it does not show his face.”
The obvious reading is the technical one. Wood is 45 now, and Frodo has to look the way he did when “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out in 2001. Philippa Boyens has described the plan for the returning actors as “digital make-up”, and that work happens in post-production, long after a set photo is taken. A face shot today would show a man in his forties in a hobbit wig. Several outlets have drawn the same conclusion and it is the only explanation that fits, although nobody at Warner Bros. has said it out loud.
Here is the part that makes the de-aging less of a cheat than it sounds. In Tolkien, Frodo stops aging once he inherits the Ring. The chapter “The Shadow of the Past” says it plainly: by his fiftieth birthday he still looks like a hobbit barely out of his tweens, and the Shire starts to talk about it. The Ring is doing to him exactly what it did to Bilbo over sixty years. A Frodo who looks the same as he did at the party is not a vanity choice by the studio. It is the book.
That only works if the film respects the gap, and the gap is the whole point of this movie. Bilbo’s farewell party happens in the year 3001 of the Third Age, and Frodo does not leave Bag End until 3018. That is seventeen years. Peter Jackson’s “Fellowship” folded them into what plays on screen like a few weeks, with Gandalf riding off after the party and seeming to come back almost at once. The hunt for Gollum happens entirely inside those missing years.
Tolkien’s version of that hunt is not a small side quest. Gandalf and Aragorn search for Gollum on and off for years. Aragorn finally catches him in 3017, near the Dead Marshes, and drags him north to Mirkwood. Gandalf questions him there and learns the worst news in the book: Sauron has already tortured the words “Shire” and “Baggins” out of him. Gollum is then left with the Elves of Mirkwood for safekeeping. That last detail explains a casting that looked random when it was announced. Lee Pace is back as Thranduil, and Thranduil is Gollum’s jailer.
The jail does not hold, and the dates line up in a way the film can use. Gollum escapes from Mirkwood in the summer of 3018 during an Orc attack. Frodo walks out of Bag End that same year on September 23rd, the day after his fiftieth birthday. The studio released a picture of Frodo at that door one day before the anniversary of him leaving it for good. That is almost certainly a coincidence, but it is a neat one.
So where does Frodo fit into all this? Mostly at home. Wood himself has called his part “relatively small”, and the timeline backs him up. For those seventeen years Frodo is in the Shire, living the long life the Ring is quietly stretching. The photo shows exactly that: a hobbit walking up to his own front door while the actual plot happens hundreds of miles away. As a first look it is honest about the size of the role, whether or not it meant to be.
The Bag End set is doing some work of its own. Hobbiton at Matamata was built for the original trilogy, rebuilt for “The Hobbit” and kept standing ever since as a tourist site. Filming there again means the Shire in this film is the same physical place as the Shire in 2001, down to the door. Principal photography began in July in Wellington, and the production has now moved through Hobbiton on its way to a release that is still fifteen months off.
It has been a long road to this set. David Zaslav announced the film in May 2024 as the first of two new Middle-earth features, with Jackson, Walsh and Boyens producing and a release penciled in for 2026. That date slipped to December 2027 before a frame was shot. A slip that size is not unusual for a film this heavy on effects, and the photos at least confirm that the cameras are finally rolling.
The cast around Wood is a mix of returns and new faces. Serkis directs and plays Gollum, and Ian McKellen is back as Gandalf. Jamie Dornan takes over Aragorn from Viggo Mortensen, which is still the biggest gamble in the project. Kate Winslet plays a new character called Marigol, Leo Woodall plays Halvard and Anya Taylor-Joy plays Seren. Walsh and Boyens wrote the script with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. None of the new names come from Tolkien, which tells you the film is building a great deal around a thin stretch of book.
That is the real risk, and the Frodo photo does not answer it. Tolkien covers the hunt for Gollum in a few pages of back matter and one long conversation with Gandalf. A feature film needs far more than that, so most of what happens on screen will be new. Returning faces are how you sell new material to an audience that treats the originals as scripture. Frodo at his door is the cheapest possible version of that promise. It says the Shire is still there, and it does not say the story is any good.
There will be a trailer long before there is a verdict, and what would settle the de-aging question is simple. Show the face. Until Warner Bros. does, every Frodo image will come from behind or from a long way off, and fans will keep reading that as a signal about the effects. For now the studio picked the right day and the right door. It just did not pick the right angle.
What Do You Think? Is hiding Frodo’s face the smart move while the de-aging is unfinished, or does it make fans more nervous, not less? Should the film spend real time on the seventeen years Jackson skipped, or keep Frodo as a cameo at the door? And does Lee Pace’s Thranduil as Gollum’s jailer make you trust the adaptation more than the new characters do?
Catch up properly: every Middle-earth film and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Lord of the Rings timeline.
See you on the next binge!
