There’s a reason people still argue about whether the Balrog has wings or what happened to the Entwives. And it’s not just because Tolkien fans have too much time on their hands. It’s because Middle-earth just gets under your skin. J.R.R. Tolkien spent the better part of his life building The Lord of the Rings, a universe so dense, so richly detailed, that even the background characters feel like they have lived entire lifetimes before the story even begins.
When Peter Jackson brought that world to the big screen in the early 2000s, something magical happened. The movies became legendary themselves. The sweeping landscapes of New Zealand, Howard Shore’s spine-tingling score, and a cast that seemed to be born for their roles all came together and created a trilogy that still holds up two decades later.
Jackson and team did right by Tolkien’s story, but the thing with ensemble epics is that the bigger the world, the more characters get left unexplored. The Fellowship alone is nine people deep, and that’s before you even get to the kings, the wizards, the warriors, and the wanderers that drift in and out of the story carrying centuries’ worth of history with them. We got glimpses. Tantalizing, frustrating, beautiful glimpses. Enough to fall completely in love with certain characters, and that’s exactly why we think these nine Lord of the Rings characters deserve their own prequel movie.
Tom Bombadil
There’s genuinely no one else like Tom Bombadil in all of Middle-earth. He appears in The Fellowship of the Ring (the book, not the movie, where he was famously left out entirely) as this strange, jolly, almost aggressively cheerful figure who lives in the Old Forest near the Shire with his wife Goldberry. Frodo and the Hobbits stumble into his territory while fleeing the Black Riders, and he just… helps them. Casually. He rescues them from Old Man Willow, hosts them for a couple of days, feeds them, sings constantly, and then sends them on their way.
Tom also picks up the One Ring, puts it on, and absolutely nothing happens to him. He’s the only being in the story for whom the Ring has zero power, zero pull, and zero effect. Tolkien never fully explains who or what he is, and that’s purely intentional, which is why the case for a Tom Bombadil prequel is less about plot and more about mythology. Tolkien himself referred to him in letters as “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside,” but within the lore of Middle-earth, figures like Gandalf and Galadriel genuinely don’t know what he is.
Tom calls himself “Eldest.” Older than the Dark Lord, older than the forests, older than the mountains. He claims to have been there before the river, before the trees, before the first rain. A prequel could dig into all that.
Morgoth
Most people who have only seen the movies know Sauron as the big bad of The Lord of the Rings. What the movies don’t really get into is that Sauron was, for a long time, just someone else’s lieutenant. That someone else was Morgoth, and he makes Sauron look easy to deal with. Originally named Melkor, Morgoth is the central villain of The Silmarillion, and his story is told within Tolkien’s vast mythological history of Middle-earth.
He began as the most powerful of the Ainur, the godlike beings created by Ilúvatar before the world even existed, and he spent an eternity choosing pride and destruction over everything else. He corrupted the earliest Elves to create the Orcs, he stole the Silmarils from the Elven craftsman Fëanor, sparking a war, and he ruled from his fortress of Utumno for thousands upon thousands of years before he was finally defeated and cast into the void.
The reason a movie about Morgoth would be extraordinary is that his arc isn’t a villain origin story in the conventional sense. It’s a tragedy. He’s someone with immense beauty and power, but he corrupts himself through his own obsession with the Flame Imperishable. That hunger, that slow unraveling, is fascinating.
Beren and Lúthien
If you want to understand what Tolkien considered the heart of his entire mythology, look at the story of Beren and Lúthien. He cared about them so much that he had both names inscribed on his and his wife Edith’s shared gravestone in Oxford. That said, Beren is a mortal Man, the last survivor of the House of Bëor, and Lúthien is the daughter of the Elven king Thingol and the Maia Melian.
They meet in the forest of Doriath, fall in love against every possible odd, and then Thingol, deeply unimpressed by his daughter’s choice, sends Beren on what is meant to be a suicide mission – to retrieve a Silmaril from the iron crown of Morgoth himself. Honestly, the fact that this hasn’t been made into a movie yet is puzzling. The story has everything. Genuine romance, action, mythological stakes, sacrifice, and an ending that is both devastating and hopeful.
Radagast
Radagast the Brown, also known as Aiwendil, is one of the five Istari sent to Middle-earth by the Valar. He appears briefly in The Fellowship of the Ring during “The Council of Elrond,” where Gandalf describes him as a worthy wizard. In Tolkien’s writings, particularly in Unfinished Tales, Radagast is portrayed as gentle, eccentric, and more concerned with the natural world than with the affairs of Men or Elves. And he’s chosen to help its people resist Sauron because of Yavanna.
In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, he gets significantly more screen time. He is portrayed by Sylvester McCoy as this wonderful, chaotic, bird-nested, mushroom-adjacent figure who rides a sleigh pulled by rabbits and talks to animals like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which, for him, it genuinely is. A prequel following him through the earlier ages and watching him fall deeper and deeper in love with the living world around him would make for a compelling character study.
Legolas
Legolas is interesting because he’s one of the most recognizable faces in the entire trilogy, and at the same time, one of the most mysterious figures. Introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring as Thranduil’s son and a representative of Mirkwood at Elrond’s council, he becomes one of the nine members of the Fellowship and is known for being a remarkable archer. His friendship with Gimli is one of the warmest relationships the story builds in the background.
Orlando Bloom made him iconic across both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. But for someone with thousands of years of life behind him, we know very little about where he actually came from or what he’s actually seen. Legolas was born in Mirkwood during the Third Age, which means he grew up in a forest that was slowly being corrupted by the shadow of Dol Guldur. A movie set in that period, exploring his youth under Thranduil’s reign as Mirkwood deteriorated around the Elves, would be atmospheric and moving.
Boromir and Faramir
Boromir and Faramir, sons of Denethor II, are central to Gondor’s fate in The Lord of the Rings. Boromir, introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring, is proud, valiant, and deeply committed to Gondor’s survival, but his desire to use the Ring leads to his downfall at Amon Hen. Faramir, appearing in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, contrasts with his brother by rejecting the Ring’s temptation. Tolkien wrote Faramir as a deliberate opposite, and together, Boromir and Faramir represent the two sides of Gondor’s struggle.
The brotherly dynamic between them is some of the richest unexplored material in the story, and a prequel following both of them would be splendid. Tolkien gives us enough in the appendices and in Faramir’s own recollections to piece together a picture. There’s a childhood under a father who clearly favored Boromir, early years as soldiers of Gondor, and the moment Faramir first encountered the Rangers of Ithilien. Plus, their relationship, the love, the competition, and the impossible pressure of Denethor would itself be stirring.
Fëanor
There’s a version of Tolkien’s mythology where Fëanor is the main character. He’s not in The Lord of the Rings in any direct sense, as his story belongs to the First Age, but his shadow falls over basically everything that happens in Middle-earth for thousands of years after his death. Fëanor was the greatest craftsman the Elves ever produced, the one who invented the Tengwar script, who captured the light of the Two Trees of Valinor inside three jewels called the Silmarils, and who watched Morgoth steal them and burn everything he loved in the process.
He then rallied his seven sons, swore an oath in the name of Ilúvatar himself to reclaim the Silmarils, and led a portion of the Noldor out of Valinor in pursuit of Morgoth. Along the way, Fëanor also burned the ships at Losgar to strand his own kin on the wrong side of the sea – a choice that defines a person for eternity. Fëanor is a potential film subject because his story is so Shakespearean that the result would be the most intense, morally complex thing the franchise could attempt.
Gimli
Gimli is easy to underestimate, which is actually kind of fitting because Dwarves get underestimated in Tolkien’s world all the time. He first appears in The Fellowship of the Ring as part of Elrond’s council, chosen to represent the Dwarves in the quest to destroy the One Ring. A warrior of the House of Durin, he fights at Helm’s Deep, the Pelennor Fields, and the Black Gate, proving himself as one of the most steadfast, most dependable companions.
There’s a moment in the movie when the Fellowship passes through Moria, and Gimli walks through the ruins of what was once the greatest kingdom his people ever built. That moment is actually the key to why a Gimli prequel would work so well. The full history of Khazad-dûm is staggering. Tolkien traces it across The Silmarillion and the appendices of The Return of the King, and while The Hobbit films tried to explore some of those ideas, the focus was always on Thorin.
Samwise Gamgee
Save the best for last, some might say, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Sam is in all three perfect movies and all three books, and he is (depending on who you ask) the actual hero of the story. He starts out as Frodo’s gardener and closest friend, gets accidentally pulled into the quest when Gandalf catches him eavesdropping, and from that point on, Sam simply refuses to leave Frodo’s side, regardless of the consequences.
He carries the Ring himself for a stretch in The Return of the King, resists it, and then gives it back without being asked. He fights a giant spider. He walks into Mordor. He carries Frodo up the side of Mount Doom when Frodo can no longer walk. Of course, Sean Astin’s performance only allows his uncomplicated goodness to come out beautifully.
The argument for a Sam prequel is simple yet interesting. We want to know who Samwise Gamgee was before the quest made him who he became. Tolkien clearly held him in very high regard, so we get pieces. A prequel set entirely in the Shire, following a young Sam through his ordinary life, his friendship with Frodo, his love of growing things, and the slow realization that the world is larger and stranger than Hobbiton, would be amazing. It wouldn’t need dragons or dark lords. It would just need Sam, who has always been enough.
You know you already have a favorite. Who deserves the movie?
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