The Hunt for Gollum

In Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy (2001–2003) Gollum was realised through Andy Serkis's motion-capture performance, glimpsed in the first film and fully present from The Two Towers onward; Serkis reprised the role in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and also appeared undisguised as the pre-Ring Sméagol in the prologue of The Return of the King, which stages the killing of Déagol on screen rather than leaving it to Gandalf's narration. The films externalise the divided mind as spoken exchanges between two personae, adding a scene in which the Sméagol side dismisses his darker half, and they invent an episode in which Gollum discards the elven waybread and casts suspicion on Sam, prompting Frodo to send his companion away before Shelob's lair. The ending is likewise altered: Frodo grapples with Gollum at the brink of the Cracks of Doom and both go over the edge together, Frodo catching hold while Gollum falls. A further film centred on the character, The Hunt for Gollum, was announced in 2024 with Serkis attached as director and lead.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 goes furthest in the other direction, giving the Ring an audible voice — supplied by Alan Howard — so that its pull on a bearer is externalised rather than reported. Three departures bear directly on it: the seventeen years between Bilbo's farewell and Frodo's setting out are compressed to a short span; Faramir, who in the novel refuses the Ring almost as soon as he understands what it is, instead takes the hobbits and their burden towards Osgiliath before releasing them, which erases the contrast the book draws between him and his brother; and in the chamber within the mountain the Ring goes into the fire out of a struggle between Frodo and Gollum rather than through Gollum's own heedless triumph. The Hobbit films of 2012–2014 read the finding of the ring backwards from the later book, treating Bilbo's keeping of it as ominous from the first. A further film under the title The Hunt for Gollum has been announced with Andy Serkis directing, but nothing of its content is fixed.