Studio: Takedown notice for 15-year-old fan-made Hunt for Gollum was a mistake

Enlarge / WETA "Gollum" figure at Arclight at the opening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." (credit: Barry King / Contributor | WireImage)

A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube.

Less than 12 hours later, though, the studio appeared to back down from this copyright fight, reinstating the fan film on YouTube amid fan backlash protesting the copyright strike on Reddit as a "dick move."

In 2009, director Chris Bouchard—who most recently directed Netflix's The Little Mermaid—released The Hunt for Gollum through Independent Online Cinema after he claimed to have "reached an understanding" with the rightsholder of The Lord of the Rings books, then called Tolkien Enterprises (now called Middle-earth Enterprises).