The property is estimated at around 2 billion dollars.
It’s hard to imagine a larger fantasy franchise than ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’, encompassing all sorts of film adaptations, television, games, merchandising, events, etc. well, everybody those rights are for sale along with other JRR Tolkien titles and a great mobilization of the entertainment and cinema industry is expected to take over them.
Zaentz Co., owner of the rights, has contracted the ACF Investment Bank to handle the negotiations and the sale process. The first meetings with regular Hollywood buyers are expected to begin in the coming days. The value of these properties It is valued at around 2 billion dollars, just over half of what Sony paid for Bungie in recent days.
This movement, just a few months after the premiere of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings series This is not a coincidence, since it is estimated that Bezos’ company may be one of the main stakeholders in acquiring these rights, in accordance with Variety. Who would not have liked it too much is Warner Bros, with whom he has had numerous legal disputes for years over these rights. Warner has some development rights with which he gave the green light to the trilogies of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ by Peter Jackson, although it later cost him lawsuits by the Tolkien estate and the publisher Harper Collins for his profits.
The rights of Zaentz Co. not only cover the power to make films, series, games, events or even amusement parks of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’, it also has certain privileges in terms of compilations Tolkien’s posthumous ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth’. Zaentz has owned these rights since 1976, although Amazon managed to grab a loophole in the agreement that left out of the deal the ability to do a television series of more than eight chapters**, so he was able to negotiate directly with those responsible for Tolkien’s estate.
At the moment it is not known where the rights to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ and the rest of Tolkien’s works will go, but it may mean the return of the franchise to video games in style. In recent years there have been games based on Tolkien’s work such as Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which is coming soon. Even so, surely many players miss those games of The Two Towers and The Return of the King in the time of PS2.
If it is Amazon who gets the rights, it would not be surprising if we would soon see one or more games from its series based on The Lord of the Rings, although it is not that the company has good experience in game development. They could always license the brand to other companiesLike Disney does with Star Wars.
Related topics: Warner Bros
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