A film about the wizard and his search for Gollum is coming – and it turns out a second may also be in the offing. Will he battle Balrog, entreat Entwines or just plod about perplexed?

Well thank goodness for that. One can only imagine the panic at Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films when that doughty old japester Sir Ian McKellen told the world last month that the Oscar-winning film-maker’s return to Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, would be not one but two movies. First of all because Jackson suffered major brickbats a decade ago for somehow contriving to turn The Hobbit (a novel that it is conceivably possible to read in less time than it would take Bilbo to hide the silverware from Lobelia Sackville-Baggins) into an entire trilogy of epic movies about elf-dwarf romances and Alfrid the greedy servant’s penchant for cross-dressing. And secondly because it is not, in fact, true.

“I can tell you definitively it isn’t two films,” screenwriter Philippa Boyens tells the new issue of Empire. “That was a genuine misunderstanding that happened because we’ve begun to work, conceptually, on two different live-action films. The first being The Hunt for Gollum, the second one still to be confirmed.”

McKellen had previously suggested, during an interview with This Morning last month, that The Hunt for Gollum would indeed arrive in two parts, prompting hilarious fears that director Andy Serkis (Jackson is producing this time) might give us an entire 30-minute montage of Aragorn striding about through various landscapes – mountains, rivers, swamps with dead people in – as he searches desperately for his snivelling target, just to … you know … pad things … out a bit. On the contrary, Boyens reveals that while there will indeed be two live-action movies featuring Gandalf, McKellen seems to have got the wrong end of the stick.

All of which makes us wonder exactly what the second movie will actually be about. And there are endless possibilities, especially now that we live in a world in which Amazon has spent millions of dollars and two entire, heavily gilded TV series just to get us to the point in Middle-earth history where Sauron is about to make the One bloody Ring. Let us just remember that Gandalf in The Rings of Power – and we are still not 100% certain he is Gandalf – has spent at least 200 hours stomping around Rhovanion and Rhûn with various Hobbit-like companions looking confused, and we are still not even in season three. Frankly, a new Lord of the Rings movie could centre on the little-known tome Gandalf’s Guide to Middle-earth’s Great Eagles and it would have a better chance of registering.

Who needs Gollum anyway? If the world really is ready for yet another three-hour movie based on bits of The Lord of the Rings that were brushed over in Jackson’s original 10-hour-plus trilogy, why not bring us “The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf v the Balrog”, in which the ailing wizard returns to Moria for an extended near-real-time battle with Tolkien’s fiery demon? This could be an epic showdown to make Jackson blush – 180 minutes of staff-flinging, fiery whip-cracking, and falling deep down into the depths of Moria. Ultimately, the movie would be less about the fight, which Tolkien hints lasted for days, and more about Gandalf’s sudden realisation that he really should have packed more lembas bread.

If that one seems too far fetched, how about “The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf and the Search for the Entwives”, in which our intrepid Istari finally caves after millennia of Treebeard moaning and sets out to find the long lost female sentient plant life that the poor Ent lamented so sorrowfully on his march through Fangorn forest in The Two Towers. After centuries of searching through enchanted shrubbery displaying cryptic graffiti along the lines of “it’s not us, it’s you” and increasingly desperate efforts to get wise to magical plant-based disguises, the wizard finally tracks down the missing lady trees, only to discover they are being protected by a fearsome feminist dryad collective. The resulting showdown makes the Battle of Helm’s Deep look like a minor disagreement over second breakfast.

The point here is that really at this stage, Jackson and his team could probably get away with a vaguely Tolkien-based narrative about Gandalf’s trip to Rivendell’s brand-new wellness retreat without anyone putting up too much of a fuss. Lord of the Rings might once have been deemed unfilmable, but these days, as long as there’s a vague mention of a ring and someone looking concerned in a forest, audiences will happily hand over their hard-earned gold like Smaug at a Lake-town fire sale.

Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you think Middle-earth is a glorious rendering of Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic epic fantasy or just a bunch of people wandering through woodland in the company of a verbose chap with a big stick and a pointy hat.