Is The Lord of the Rings now a never-ending franchise like Marvel and Star Wars?

‘The road goes ever on”, wrote Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But the esteemed Oxford don and creator of the high fantasy genre probably wasn’t expecting it to lead to a billion dollar multimedia franchise to rival Marvel and Star Wars.

But that, it seems, is what Tolkien’s Middle-earth tales are slowly morphing into, almost 70 years after he completed work on The Lord of the Rings, which was originally published in 1954 and 1955. This week, – and it all looks surprisingly legit. Brian Cox will play Helm Hammerhand, legendary defender of the Rohirrim, with Miranda Otto returning from Peter Jackson’s turn-of-the-century Lord of the Rings trilogy as Eowyn (now the story’s narrator). That triptych’s producer and screenwriter, Philippa Boyens, is executive producing, along with conceptual designer Alan Lee and visual effects expert Richard Taylor of Weta Digital.