Lord of the Rings: WB Fires Back After Reports of Film Rights Sale

By Spencer Perry

Last week brought the surprise news that the film and video game rights to The Lord of the Rings book series and The Hobbit were going up for sale very soon. At the time a report revealed that Saul Zaentz Co. was planning to sell off the "movie, gaming, merchandising, and live event rights" to the fantasy books with a valuation putting the potential price tag at $2 billion. As fans of the franchise may wonder however, doesn't Warner Bros. and their subsidiary New Line Cinema own the rights to Lord of the Rings? WB sure thinks so and have fired back at the news that the rights are for sale. 

Writing in a statement to Variety today, a spokesperson for Warner Bros. noted that: "New Line Cinema has maintained the theatrical film rights, both live-action and animated, for over two decades now. We are currently in production on our anime film 'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' and look forward to bringing audiences back to Middle-earth." To their credit, they're right, the "War of the Rohirrim" feature film even released a first-look earlier this week. The trade further reports that since first gaining the rights to the franchise in the late 1990s, Warner Bros. has exercised "options in a timely manner" and even made "periodic payments" to Zaentz Co. as a means of keeping the series.

As film fans may recall, a lot of these rights situations have a stipulation that studios have a window within which they must act to maintain the rights to something, usually a few years where they have to start production on something related to the property. 20th Century Fox for example, prior to being acquired by The Walt Disney Company, held the film rights to some of Marvel's characters like Daredevil and The Fantastic Four, and acted very quickly to reboot both properties so they could continue to hold the rights. The later of these made it off the ground and resulted in a widely derided movie, the former returned to the House of Ideas and has made its way into the MCU.

To that end it's not difficult to wonder if WB's new film, the previously mentioned animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is being made to adhere to contract stipulations for the rights. Peter Jackson's original Lord of the Rings films were released from 2001 to 2003 with The Hobbit trilogy following from 2012 to 2014. The War of the Rohirrim is scheduled to arrive in 2024, meaning that each of these entries is about a decade apart, a time frame that aligns with many other famous efforts to hold on to film rights. That's all speculation on our part though.

Frankly this is all very messy Hollywood business, one that we can't fully know the answers to as studios and rights holders largely keep paperwork like this locked up tight. In any event there will no doubt be more updates on this down the line.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will debut on April 12, 2024. Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere in September of this year.

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