The Embracer Group, who are slowly shopping for any and each online game writer and studio in the marketplace, simply introduced that they’ve bought Middle-earth Enterprises, the corporate that owns the big-and-small-screen rights to most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most vital works, together with Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Some background (and please bear with me, this will get sophisticated): Middle-earth Enterprises was once a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood manufacturing studio that in 1976 managed to choose up the rights to just about every thing to do with Tolkien besides the publication of the books themselves. Those rights had been used to make the 1978 animated characteristic, and ever since have solely been licensed out to different corporations—an operation overseen by Middle-earth Enterprises—by no means absolutely bought.

That means every thing from Peter Jackson’s movies to EA’s video video games had been solely (expensively) borrowing the Lord of the Rings license (Amazon’s upcoming TV collection, in the meantime, is a complete different story). Final possession nonetheless lay with The Saul Zaentz Company, and coated “a vast intellectual property catalogue and worldwide rights to motion pictures, video games, board games, merchandising, theme parks and stage productions relating to the iconic fantasy literary works The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Or, it did. Until now.

The Saul Zaentz Company floated the sale of their rights earlier this 12 months for an eye-popping $2 billion, and whereas Embracer’s buy worth wasn’t disclosed of their announcement, you’d assume the worth they paid could be someplace in that ballpark. [Update: in a separate announcement, Embracer say the full value for all of the acquisitions they made right now was SEK8.2 billion, which is round USD$770 million].

As the announcement says, the acquisition covers just about every thing 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 Middle-earth, wherein Middle-earth Enterprises has monetary pursuits, embody the much-heralded Amazon collection The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power which is able to premiere on September 2, 2022, set 1000’s of years earlier than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), set for launch in 2024, and the cell sport The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth (Electronic Arts).

Note that by buying Middle-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 for the reason that 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 wish to do with the license sooner or later, that’s spelled out within the press launch as effectively:

Other alternatives embody exploring extra motion pictures primarily based on iconic characters comparable to 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 by merchandising and different experiences.

With Embracer proudly owning each a ton of online game studios and in addition board sport 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 (word that Asmodee already personal the Lord of the Rings license for board video games).

Of course it wouldn’t be an Embracer announcement with information that, alongside the Middle-earth Enterprises buy, the corporate additionally purchased a bunch of different stuff right now, together with bodily copy specialists Limited Run Games, Tripwire Interactive (Killing Floor, 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 your base belong to us” meme comes from.