Warner Bros. maintains it still has the rights to The Lord of the Rings

Last week we reported that the Saul Zaentz Company, an organization that holds a major stake in the film, video game, merchandising, and theme park rights for The Lord of the Rings, was putting them up for sale. Zaentz Co. acquired the rights to LOTR back in the late 1960s and ’70s and has been continuously licensing them out to Warner Bros. since the ’90s, which is what led to audiences getting Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies as well as many video games.

But Zaentz Co. is now looking to sell, perhaps thinking that the price will spike with Amazon’s new production The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on the way. The company claims that the rights have reverted back to them and that they are now looking for bidders for the whole package, which is estimated to be worth around $2 billion.

But Warner Bros. has other ideas, claiming that they still have the exclusive rights to create movies based on the franchise. “New Line Cinema has maintained the theatrical film rights, both live-action and animated, for over two decades now,” a Warner Bros. spokeswoman told Variety. “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.”

So despite Zaentz Co.’s claims that the rights have reverted and back to them and that they’re putting them up for sale, Warner Bros. claims that they still have the rights. What gives?

Who actually owns the rights to Lord of the Rings?

This is a somewhat complicated situation, but hopefully we can make sense of it. Zaentz Co. has been licensing the rights to The Lord of the Rings to Warner Bros., which means that while the Zaentz Co. still technically owns the rights, they have given Warner Bros. the right to make movies  based on the franchise so long as certain conditions are met. In a typical licensing deal like this one, those conditions include things like periodic payments to the rights owner and that the studio continues to develop projects based on the property within a certain time frame.

Warner Bros. maintains that it has met all its contractual obligations to Zaentz Co. and that they therefore still have the license to make works based on the series, which means that Zaentz Co. can’t sell them because they’re already actively licensing them out. According to Variety, the two companies are currently in a quiet mediation to try and settle this dispute. And this isn’t the first time they’ve gotten into disagreements about who owns what when it comes to The Lord of the Rings.

Of course, the timing is surely not a coincidence. That’s where things get a bit simpler. Amazon just revealed the first teaser of its highly anticipated The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power prequel series, which they were able to make because Zaentz Co. doesn’t hold the rights to Lord of the Rings television shows longer than eight episodes. For that, Amazon went straight to the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Pretty much any Lord of the Rings news breaking at the moment likely involves The Rings of Power, which is generating a huge amount of hype. The Super Bowl teaser trailer racked up more than 257 million views within its first 24 hours online, becoming the most-watched Super Bowl ad of all time. According to one of Variety’s sources, “Somebody is telling [Zaentz Co.] that this is a lottery ticket, and this is an effort to bid it up.”

As if to drive home the point that they are still working on The Lord of the Rings, Warner Bros. just revealed a first look at their upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim anime film, which is due out in 2024. So regardless of what’s happening with the rights, the studio is keeping at it.

All told, this may all come to nothing. Or it may end up reshaping the future of The Lord of the Rings on film. It’s hard to call anything at this point, although it is worth noting that Warner Bros. has steadily released different types of Lord of the Rings content over the years, including the films by Peter Jackson. It’s a big property for the studio, and one they won’t give up without a fierce fight. For now, we wait and watch.

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