A 15 year old fan film titled ‘The Hunt For Gollum’ has been copyright striked by Warner Bros. The production house announced a new spin-off movie of the loved ‘Lord Of The Rings’ franchise only yesterday. The movie will be directed by and starring Andrew Serkis and is titled ‘The Hunt For Gollum’. The fan movie had the same title and most probably dealt with a similar story.
It is highly unethical for a production house of the stature of Warner Bros. to suppress individual creative Voices of such small scale. The movie could not have done any loss to the spin-off by Andrew Serkis.
The short film had a total of 13 million views on YouTube and it has been circulating on the internet for 15 years. All of a sudden a corporation decides to make a movie with the same name and same subject and the film is taken down. The news has not reached a lot of audiences, but netizens have been reacting angrily to this act of suppression.
Creative independent filmmakers have always been suppressed by such monstrous corporations. While in an optimistic parallel we can see filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky picking up and backing independent filmmakers after watching their short films, it is also true that independent short filmmakers are not having much space to express themselves even on the internet now.