News of Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis’s eyebrow-raising return to Middle-earth seems to have passed the two stars by. Are Aragorn and Gandalf to be replaced?

Just how exactly did Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis’s shocking plan to return to Middle-earth with the forthcoming The Lord of The Rings: The Hunt for Gollum come about? Let us imagine the duo kicking back in Jackson’s Hobbity New Zealand pad with a good batch of Longbottom Leaf, several cases of miruvor wine recently delivered from Lothlórien, and plenty of seed cakes and cold chicken. Conspicuous by their absence from the party, however, unless something distinctly fishy is going on, are Viggo Mortensen (AKA Aragorn, AKA Strider, AKA King of Arnor and Gondor) and Ian McKellen (AKA Gandalf, AKA Mithrandir, AKA that bloke with the pointy hat and the fireworks). Because neither seems to have been so much as consulted about the new movie before it was announced to the public.

This is only strange if The Hunt for Gollum does turn out to be what everyone expects it to be, a big screen take on a minor section of JRR Tolkien’s sprawling fantasy tome that was only left out of Jackson’s Oscar-winning turn-of-the-century film trilogy because there was really no reason for it to be left in. The new movie is widely expected to cover the period in which Aragorn, who has been charged by Gandalf with the task of finding out what happened to Gollum after Bilbo’s encounter with the hideous creature beneath the Misty Mountains in The Hobbit, finally gets his hands on the rotten miscreant in the Dead Marshes and drags him before the elves of Mirkwood. It’s mentioned briefly in the books at the Council of Elrond, and lightly passed over in the same chapter of the movies.