Peter Jackson ended The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies with a knock at Bilbo Baggins’ door. The elderly hobbit initially turns his visitor away, then welcomes him in after hearing Gandalf’s voice. Released in 2014, the scene brought Jackson’s six Middle-earth films back to the doorstep where The Fellowship of the Ring began. It sent the story toward another adventure while closing the director’s own enormous undertaking. Twelve years later, that invitation into Bag End still marks the end of his most recent narrative feature.
Nothing about Bilbo opening that door suggested Jackson would spend the next twelve years away from narrative filmmaking. He has continued directing documentaries, but the filmmaker who sent the Fellowship through Moria and King Kong up the Empire State Building has yet to stage another fictional adventure. Now even the return to his own Middle-earth will happen under another director, with Andy Serkis taking charge of The Hunt for Gollum.
Jackson’s next directing project will take him back to The Adventures of Tintin, which he produced for Steven Spielberg fifteen years ago. He has confirmed that he and Fran Walsh have finished the sequel’s screenplay and that he intends to direct it next, as the official TinTin website reports. There is no filming or release date yet, but the long-promised handoff from Spielberg to Jackson now has a completed script behind it.
Why Peter Jackson Hasn’t Directed A Feature Film Since The Hobbit
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Jackson spent part of his time away making century-old soldiers look less distant. In They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), flickering monochrome images give way to color, corrected movement, and reconstructed sound. Lip-readers helped recover what the men were saying so actors could voice their words (via BFI). Soldiers previously seen marching silently through history could joke and speak, making their youth harder to overlook.
That work led toward The Beatles: Get Back (2021). Jackson told D23 that a London research trip for his war documentary included a meeting with Apple Corps. On the Beatles tapes, conversations disappeared beneath the sound of guitars. Jackson could see the musicians talking but could not always hear what they said. His Park Road team developed machine-learning tools to separate speech from instruments, recovering exchanges that the original recordings had buried. Jackson’s Get Back interview gave a lot of insight into his perspective while working through the footage.
Jackson was still solving filmmaking problems, but the challenge had changed. Instead of making audiences believe Gollum was in the room, his team was recovering conversations that microphones had failed to capture clearly. Viewers could finally follow conversations that had spent decades buried beneath the guitars.
Why Isn’t Peter Jackson Directing The New Lord Of The Rings Movie?
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Jackson’s choice of director came down to the character in the title. Discussing The Hunt for Gollum at Cannes, he said the story would be “more interesting if Gollum himself directed it.” Andy Serkis, he added, was as close as they could get. Jackson remains a producer, while Serkis will direct and reprise the role he helped create.
Serkis also knows Jackson’s Middle-earth from the other side of the camera. He told MovieMaker that he spent 200 days directing the second unit on The Hobbit. Serkis returned to play Gollum opposite Martin Freeman, then spent months directing scenes he did not appear in. Jackson had already trusted him to help make Middle-earth work on camera, not just inhabit one of its characters.
The exhausting circumstances of The Hobbit make it tempting to read Jackson’s absence as reluctance to repeat that experience. His stated explanation, however, credits Serkis’s suitability. Serkis spent years deciding how Sméagol pleads and Gollum threatens, sometimes within the same exchange. Directing lets him build a film around those choices, with Jackson’s support as a producer.
The Adventures Of Tintin 2 Is An Exciting Return For Peter Jackson
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Jackson’s King Kong finds room for Ann Darrow to perform vaudeville tricks for the creature holding her captive. She gets a laugh out of him, then has to deal with his demand for more. Ann starts performing to keep herself alive, but Kong’s laughter gives her a reason to keep going after the immediate fear passes. For a moment, Ann can see that Kong wants her to do something besides scream.
Spielberg gives Haddock more to do than cause the next accident. After the scrolls are lost, Tintin is ready to quit, and the captain has to talk him out of it. Haddock has spent much of the journey depending on Tintin to get him out of trouble. When he finally returns the favor, he does it by staying beside him and talking.
Jackson would begin with Tintin and Haddock already trusting each other, which gives their next disaster more to test. Haddock can be the reason a plan falls apart and still be the person Tintin needs when it does. Jackson made Ann’s attempts to entertain Kong worth watching in a film full of dinosaurs. He could give Tintin and Haddock just as much to enjoy between escapes.
Peter Jackson Could Make Multiple Tintin Movies
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Jackson was discussing a fourth Tintin before Spielberg’s first had reached theaters. In a 2009 Comic-Con interview with ComingSoon, he suggested saving Hergé’s lunar adventures for a third or fourth installment. The second, he said, should stay on Earth. Paramount’s announcement that year also put Jackson in line to direct the second film and left room for a third after it.
Hergé gives Haddock a spectacularly bad place to get drunk in Explorers on the Moon. He leaves the rocket in a spacesuit, and Tintin has to follow him out to bring him back. Jackson mentioned in the same interview with ComingSoon that the Moon books were possibilities for later films. With that said, his sequel ideas have already extended to a rescue where one of Haddock’s mistakes could leave both men drifting through space.
The Moon films are still just an idea Jackson discussed, with no further sequel announced. His second film still has to reach production. But success could give Peter Jackson a chance to return to books he wanted to adapt before Spielberg’s film even opened. After waiting fifteen years for Haddock’s next disaster, seeing him cause one in space would be a welcome change of scenery.
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