The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Again, allegedly.

But alright, so, Return of the King ending time.

How did everybody involved in this whole thing shake out? What was the fallout? Well, for Russell Pike, it sounds like even if he did somehow get that coup he attempted to work, it wouldn't have been for long, as he would be convicted of tax evasion in 2012 over $7.9 million dollars he made from Zion's stock that he just never bothered to tell the IRS about.

For his troubles, he got 52 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

The third one came out on that year.

It was called Return of the King.

I was going to mention that out of the way, because I know a lot of people may have forgotten when we should have that done.

But then a bunch of other ones came out.

So I want to, you know, yeah, you could pick Return of the King as the number one, but just don't count out the rest of the list, which includes...

Finding Nemo, Lost in Translation, Mystic River, Monster, The Fog of War, Cold Mountain in America, The Barbarian Invasions, House of Sand and Fog, Kill Bill Volume 1, Old Boy, Memories of Murder, The Matrix Reloaded, X-Men 2, The Last Samurai, The Matrix Revolutions, I guess would count both of them.

I forget the release dates on them, actually.

You're tearing me apart!

In the Hunt for Gollum news, Lawrence McCoyray revealed on his Instagram this past week that he would be returning in the upcoming Andy Serkis-led film.

Lawrence had been one of the go-to bad guys throughout the Lord of the Rings franchise, having appeared as Lurtz in The Fellowship of the Ring, the orc Gothmog and the Witch-King of Angmar in Return of the King, and the character of Bolg in The Hobbit films.

What role he will be playing in The Hunt for Gollum, set for release in December of 2027, is yet to be announced, but if the past is anything to go by, it would be a safe bet to assume that he's going to be playing a villain.

In Rings of Power news, Amazon finally dropped a full-length trailer as well as several featurettes for the upcoming Season 3, which will debut on Prime Video on November 11th.

And if Dune 3 comes out and blows the doors off what people were expecting, and for those of us who've seen the first seven minutes that they showed at CinemaCon and they've showed at other IMAX screenings, That is insane and phenomenally epic.

So I think if they nail it, this could be a Return of the King situation where Denis has shown that for three installments, he's brought what would normally have been a very unadaptable movie to life and created many masterpieces in each of them, in my opinion.

And if the third one comes out and he blows away the first two, that absolutely is in play for best picture.

I think it's the only thing that could beat the Odyssey right now is Dune 3,

I did promise you that bedtime story.

So I actually saw the Lord of the Rings films before I read the book.

So when The Return of the King came out in 2003, I thought...

I was about 10, I think.

But as we are on a Halloween themed video and black cats do appear quite frequently across Halloween, I did a little bit of digging into the cats of Queen Beruthiel.

So Beruthiel was a queen of Gondor and she had 10 cats.

nine black and one white and she used them as spies sending them across gondor to dig up people's secrets and the white cat she used that one to spy on the other nine cats so even the cats couldn't be trusted and you find this in unfinished tales it says in a letter written in 1956 my father said that there is hardly any reference in the lord of the rings to things that do not actually exist on its own plane of secondary or sub-creational reality.

And added in a footnote to this, the cats of Queen Baruthiel and the names of the other two wizards, five minus Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast, are all that I recollect.

And the glimpse of that beauty makes you hungry and thirsty for it and it propels you forward.

There's a moment in the film version of Lord of the Rings in the third movie, The Return of the King, that captures a little bit of this, even though for those of you who are Tolkien purists, the scene isn't in the book in the same place.

The language is in the book, but in a different place.

But the film is burned in so many people's minds.

Let me just kind of unpack it.

So this is in The Return of the King and two of the characters, Gandalf and Pippin, are in the city, Minas Tirith, and the gate of the city is breaking.

The enemy is pounding it in with a giant battering ram.

And Gandalf and Pippin are waiting for the enemy to come through where they'll have a last stand.

Yes, exactly.

And then having – because I'm pretty sure Return of the King and Revenge of the Sith came out, if not the same year, really close to each other.

I think so.

And so seeing the wrap-ups, the two trilogies – And then the Matrix trilogy, I think, was around then too.

But it really isn't.

I mean, it's not like you could even identify anything in it that you'd say, oh, well, she's just put down Return of the King or something like that, you know.

But I guess the question that I have kind of building on that is just, We've talked a little bit about the reactions that you've gotten to the stories and some of your motivation in writing the stories.

I sense, and I wonder if you're right, that there's just increasingly an appetite for these kinds of stories.