The world of rights and distribution contracts have only gotten messier with the advent of streaming and multimedia shared universes, and rarely has that been made clearer than in the case of The Lord of the Rings.
For example, it was revealed in a recent earnings reports that Embracer spent $395 million to acquire motion picture, video game, board game, merchandising, theme park, and stage production rights pertaining to The Lord of the Rings franchise, in addition to other authorized works hailing from both the Tolkien Estate and Harper Collins.
However, Prime Video’s blockbuster series The Rings of Power – which isn’t an Embracer-backed production, to make things a little more confusion – cost more to make than the Swedish company paid for a huge slice of the Middle-Earth back catalogue. Amazon sunk an estimated $465 million into season 1 of the planned five-year fantasy, with plans to funnel a billion into the sprawling universe when all is said and done.
Things didn’t off to the greatest start with the Gollum video game, which could generously be described as having under-performed both critically and commercially to put it lightly. Meanwhile, The Rings of Power has been facing some backlash of its own for unsavory reasons that shouldn’t need to be explained, all while brand new movies are in the works after Warner Bros. decided that Middle-earth was an IP well worth revisiting given the multi-billion dollar success of Peter Jackson’s trilogies.
You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out who owns what and who can do what with which stories without stepping on somebody else’s toes, but the most important thing to remember is that The Lord of the Rings remains big business.
