Embracer group, who gradually buying every publisher and video game studio on the marketjust announced that it has acquired Middle-Earth Enterprises, which owns the widescreen and small screen rights to most of JRR Tolkien’s most important works, including Lord of the Rings and Hobbits.
Some background information (and mind me, this gets complicated): Middle-Earth Enterprises was once a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood production studio that in 1976 was managed to get the rights to almost everything related to Tolkien except for the publishing of books. Those rights were used to make the cartoon in 1978, and since then have only been licensed to other companies—an operation overseen by the Middle-earth Enterprise—never sold out.
That means everything from Peter Jackson movies to EA video games is just (expensive) Licensing the Lord of the Rings right (Meanwhile, Amazon’s upcoming TV series It’s a completely different story). Ultimate ownership remains with The Saul Zaentz Company and includes “an extensive portfolio of intellectual property and worldwide rights to motion pictures, video games, board games, merchandising, sale, amusement park, and theatrical productions related to iconic works of literary fiction Lord of the Rings trio and Hobbits by JRR Tolkien”.
Or, it did. Until now.
Saul Zaentz Company sold their rights earlier this year for $2 billion., and while Embracer’s purchase price wasn’t disclosed in their announcement, you’d assume the price they paid would be somewhere in that ballpark.[[[[Update: in a separate announcementEmbracer says the total cost of all the acquisitions it makes today is SEK 8.2 billion, or about $770 million.].
As the announcement sayspurchases include pretty much anything you associate with Lord of the Rings in addition to self-publishing books (rights held by HarperCollins), including:
Upcoming major works set in Middle-earth in which Middle-earth Enterprises have a financial interest, including the much-heralded Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere on September 2, 2022, set thousands of years ago Hobbits and Lord of the Rings; cartoon The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), released in 2024 and mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Hero of Middle-earth (Electronic Arts).
Note that by purchasing the Middle-earth Enterprises themselves, Embracer does not necessarily cancel or reassign any Lord of the Rings rights agreements. For example, Warner Bros. has held the motion picture license since the 1990s, which is how Peter Jackson’s trilogy is made, and the upcoming anime is clearly unaffected as it is clearly stated in Embracer’s announcement.
As for what Embracer might want to do with the license in the future, that’s also outlined in the press release:
Other opportunities include exploring additional films based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from JRR Tolkien’s literary works, and continuing continues to offer new opportunities for fans to explore this fictional world through sales and other experiences.
With Embracer owning tons of video game studios and board game company Asmodee (who in turn owns Fantasy Flight), you can expect plenty of licensed games to follow as well (note that Asmodee already owns Lord of the Rings license for board game).
Of course, that wouldn’t be an announcement by Embracer given the news that, along with the acquisition of Middle-Earth Enterprises, the company also bought a host of other things today, including copy specialists. Limited Run Games physics, Tripwire Interactive (Murder Floor, Chivalry Spirit), Tuxedo Labs (Destroy) and, in an oddly poetic move for the buyers in question, Japanese studio Tatsujin. Their boss is Masahiro Yuge, co-founder of Toaplan, developer of Zero WingThe game is derived from the meme “All your bases belong to us”.
