The Embracer Group, who are slowly buying any and every video game publisher and studio on the market, just announced that they have purchased Middle-earth Enterprises, the company that owns the rights to most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important works, including Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Some background: Middle-earth Enterprises used to be a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood production studio that in 1976 managed to pick up the rights to pretty much everything to do with Tolkien except the publication of the books themselves. Those rights were used to make the 1978 animated feature, and ever since have only been licensed out to other companies—an operation overseen by Middle-earth Enterprises—never fully sold.
That means everything from Peter Jackson’s films to EA’s video games were only borrowing the Lord of the Rings license (Amazon’s upcoming TV series, meanwhile, is a whole other story). Ownership still lay with The Saul Zaentz Company. Or, it did, until now.
The Saul Zaentz Company floated the sale of their rights earlier this year for an eye-popping $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 announcement, Embracer say the total cost for all the acquisitions they made today was SEK8.2 billion, which is around USD$770 million].
As the announcement says, the purchase covers pretty much everything you’d associate with Lord of the Rings beyond the publishing of the books themselves (whose rights are held by HarperCollins), including:
Key upcoming works set in Middle-earth, in which Middle-earth Enterprises has financial interests, include the much-heralded Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power which will premiere on September 2, 2022, set thousands of years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; the animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), set for release in 2024, and the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth (Electronic Arts).
As for what Embracer might want to do with the license in the future, that’s spelled out in the press release as well:
Other opportunities include exploring additional movies based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and continue to provide new opportunities for fans to explore this fictive world through merchandising and other experiences.
With Embracer owning both a ton of video game studios and also board game company Asmodee (who in turn own Fantasy Flight), you can expect a ton of licensed games to follow suit as well (note that Asmodee already own the Lord of the Rings license for board games).
Of course it wouldn’t be an Embracer announcement with news that, alongside the Middle-earth Enterprises purchase, the company also bought a bunch of other stuff today, including physical copy specialists Limited Run Games, Tripwire Interactive (Killing Floor, Chivalry), Tuxedo Labs (Teardown) and, in a bizarrely poetic move given the buyers in question, Japanese studio Tatsujin. Their boss is Masahiro Yuge, a co-founder of Toaplan, the developers of Zero Wing, the game that the “All your base belong to us” meme comes from.
Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit Rights Sold To Embracer Group & Latest News Update
Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit Rights Sold To Embracer Group & More Live News
All this news that I have made and shared for you people, you will like it very much and in it we keep bringing topics for you people like every time so that you keep getting news information like trending topics and you It is our goal to be able to get
all kinds of news without going through us so that we can reach you the latest and best news for free so that you can move ahead further by getting the information of that news together with you. Later on, we will continue
to give information about more today world news update types of latest news through posts on our website so that you always keep moving forward in that news and whatever kind of information will be there, it will definitely be conveyed to you people.
Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit Rights Sold To Embracer Group & More News Today
All this news that I have brought up to you or will be the most different and best news that you people are not going to get anywhere, along with the information Trending News, Breaking News, Health News, Science News, Sports News, Entertainment News, Technology News, Business News, World News of this made available to all of you so that you are always connected with the news, stay ahead in the matter and keep getting today news all types of news for free till today so that you can get the news by getting it. Always take two steps forward
Credit Goes To News Website – This Original Content Owner News Website . This Is Not My Content So If You Want To Read Original Content You Can Follow Below Links