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.”