The Embracer Group, who are slowly shopping for any and each online game writer and studio available on the market, simply introduced that they’ve bought Center-earth Enterprises, the corporate that owns the big-and-small-screen rights to most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most necessary works, together with Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Some background (and please bear with me, this will get sophisticated): Center-earth Enterprises was a division of The Saul Zaentz Firm, a Hollywood manufacturing studio that in 1976 managed to select up the rights to just about the whole lot to do with Tolkien besides the publication of the books themselves. These rights have been used to make the 1978 animated function, and ever since have solely been licensed out to different corporations—an operation overseen by Center-earth Enterprises—by no means totally offered.
Which means the whole lot from Peter Jackson’s movies to EA’s video video games have been solely (expensively) licensing the Lord of the Rings rights (Amazon’s upcoming TV collection, in the meantime, is an entire different story). Closing possession nonetheless lay with The Saul Zaentz Firm, and lined “an unlimited mental property catalogue and worldwide rights to movement footage, video video games, board video games, merchandising, theme parks and stage productions regarding the enduring fantasy literary works The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien”.
Or, it did. Till now.
The Saul Zaentz Firm floated the sale of their rights earlier this yr for an eye-popping $2 billion, and whereas Embracer’s buy worth wasn’t disclosed of their announcement, you’d assume the value they paid could be someplace in that ballpark. [Update: in a separate announcement, Embracer say the total cost for all the acquisitions they made today was SEK8.2 billion, which is around USD$770 million].
Because the announcement says, the acquisition covers just about the whole lot you’d affiliate with Lord of the Rings past the publishing of the books themselves (whose rights are held by HarperCollins), together with:
Key upcoming works set in Center-earth, by which Center-earth Enterprises has monetary pursuits, embody the much-heralded Amazon collection The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Energy which is able to premiere on September 2, 2022, set hundreds of years earlier than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The Struggle of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), set for launch in 2024, and the cellular recreation The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Center-earth (Digital Arts).
Be aware that by buying Center-earth Enterprises itself, Embracer doesn’t essentially must go cancel or reassign any present Lord of the Rings rights agreements. Warner Bros. has held the movement image license because the Nineties, for instance, that’s how Peter Jackson’s trilogy was made, and the upcoming anime is clearly unaffected because it’s particularly highlighted in Embracer’s announcement.
As for what Embracer may need to do with the license sooner or later, that’s spelled out within the press launch as effectively:
Different alternatives embody exploring further films primarily based on iconic characters resembling Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and different characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and proceed to offer new alternatives for followers to discover this fictive world via merchandising and different experiences.
With Embracer proudly owning each a ton of online game studios and likewise board recreation firm Asmodee (who in flip personal Fantasy Flight), you’ll be able to anticipate a ton of licensed video games to comply with go well with as effectively (notice that Asmodee already personal the Lord of the Rings license for board video games).
After all it wouldn’t be an Embracer announcement with information that, alongside the Center-earth Enterprises buy, the corporate additionally purchased a bunch of different stuff at this time, together with bodily copy specialists Restricted Run Video games, Tripwire Interactive (Killing Ground, Chivalry), Tuxedo Labs (Teardown) and, in a bizarrely poetic transfer given the consumers in query, Japanese studio Tatsujin. Their boss is Masahiro Yuge, a co-founder of Toaplan, the builders of Zero Wing, the sport that the “All of your base belong to us” meme comes from.
