United States: With the signing of a contract by Warner Bros and New Line to produce additional adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Middle-Earth is returning to the big screen.

Warner Bros Discovery’s CEO, David Zaslav, disclosed that a contract had been negotiated to produce “several” movies based on JRR Tolkien’s works. The price of the agreement with the Swedish game business Embracer Group, which holds the rights to most of Tolkien’s realm, has not yet been made public.

The movies will be created by the Warner Bros. production business New Line Cinema, which also worked on Peter Jackson’s trilogy from 2001 to 2003. These movies brought in approximately $3 billion worldwide, and the third instalment, The Return of the King, took home 11 Oscars, including best picture.

The new multi-year agreement, which would allow the studio to make feature films based on both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and The Hobbit, was pushed by the division’s new heads, Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who oversee Warner pictures and New Line.

For all the scope and detail lovingly packed into the two trilogies, the vast, complex, and dazzling universe imagined by JRR Tolkien remains largely unexplored, according to De Luca and Abdy, who also noted that New Line “took an unprecedented leap of faith” on Tolkien’s world two decades ago. However, they also hinted that any new films would not necessarily revisit what Jackson’s films had covered.

Zaslav has spoken about the need for additional film franchises to be profitable. He has supervised significant layoffs at Warner Bros Discovery since the media behemoth was created by the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. last year. The media conglomerate revealed a $2.1 billion loss, primarily due to writedowns and cost reductions following the merger.

The animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which takes place 183 years before the events in The Lord of the Rings, is being produced by New Line and Warner Bros. Animation. In April 2024, the film, which elaborates on the life of Helm Hammerhand, a famous monarch of Rohan, will be released in theatres.

The Lord of the Rings television rights is still under Amazon’s ownership. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the tech giant’s inaugural production, cost more than $450 million to produce.

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