The Embracer Group, the are slowly buying every video game publisher and studio on the markethave just announced that they have bought Middle-earth Enterprises, the company that owns the big and small screen rights to most of JRR Tolkien’s most important works, including Lord of the rings and The Hobbit.
Some background information (and please be patient, this gets complicated): Middle-earth Enterprises was formerly a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood production studio that in 1976 managed to acquire the rights to pretty much everything Tolkien-related, other than publishing the books themselves. These rights were used to create the 1978 animated film and have since only been licensed to other companies – a company overseen by Middle-earth Enterprises – which has never been fully sold.
That means everything from Peter Jackson’s movies to EA’s video games is only (expensively) Borrow the Lord of the rings License (Amazon’s upcoming TV series, meanwhile is a whole different story). Ultimate ownership was still with The Saul Zaentz Company and comprised “a vast catalog of intellectual property and worldwide rights in motion pictures, video games, board games, merchandising, theme parks and stage productions related to the iconic fantasy fiction works of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.
Or it did. Until now.
The Saul Zaentz Company launched the sale of its rights for a staggering $2 billion earlier this year, and while Embracer didn’t disclose the purchase price in their announcement, you’d assume the price they paid would be somewhere in that ballpark.[[[[To update: in a separate announcementAccording to Embracer, the total cost of all acquisitions made today was SEK 8.2 billion, which is about $770 million].
As the announcement saysthe purchase covers pretty much everything you would associate with it Lord of the rings beyond the publication of the books themselves (which HarperCollins owns the rights to), including:
One of the most important upcoming works in Middle-earth in which Middle-earth Enterprises has a financial interest is the much-lauded Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power which premieres on September 2, 2022 and is set thousands of years earlier The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), due out in 2024, and the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth (Electronic Arts).
Note that by purchasing Middle-earth Enterprises itself, Embracer does not necessarily have to cancel or reassign possibly existing Lord of the rings Right Agreements. Warner Bros. has had the film license since the 1990s, for example Peter Jackson’s trilogy, and the coming Anime is clearly not affected as it is specifically highlighted in Embracer’s announcement.
What Embracer intends to do with the license in the future is also outlined in the press release:
Additional opportunities include exploring additional films based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from the literary works of JRR Tolkien, and continue to offer fans new ways to explore this fictional world through merchandise and other experiences explore .
Since Embracer owns a slew of video game studios as well as board game company Asmodee (which in turn owns Fantasy Flight), you can expect a slew of licensed games to follow as well (Note that Asmodee already owns these Lord of the rings License for board games).
Of course, it wouldn’t be an Embracer announcement with news that in addition to buying Middle-earth Enterprises, the company also bought a few other things today, including limited run games physical copy specialists Tripwire Interactive (killing ground, chivalry), Tuxedo Labs (tear down) and, in a bizarrely poetic move given the buyers in question, Japanese studio Tatsujin. Your boss is Masahiro Yuge, a co-founder of Toaplan, the developers of zero wingsthe game that the All Your Base is Ours meme came from.
