Amazon Eyes LOTR & The Hobbit Rights Expected to go on Sale This Week

J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are invaluable as the author’s stories transport the reader to a different world.

Yet to bring that world to reality is no easy feat as studios have to spend quite a few bucks for these franchises’ rights. However, now there’s an opportunity that studios are bound to go berserk over.

Saul Zaentz Co., the company that holds the rights to various works by Tolkien, is setting up an auction for the movie, merchandising, gaming, and live event rights to Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other titles.

According to Variety, Zaentz Co. has hired ACF Investment Bank to handle the sale process, taking place this week with an estimated value of at least $2 billion.

Along with the two franchises’ content, events, merchandising and theme parks rights, Zaentz Co. also holds limited matching rights to any content Tolkien estate makes based on Tolkien’s two posthumous works: The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth.

Warner Bros. has some film development rights to LOTR through New Line Cinema. However, as Zaentz Co. sees it, these live-action film rights went back to them last year “in part because Warner Bros. had not been actively developing new LOTR and related content.”

Although Saul Zaentz acquired film adaptation and other rights to numerous Tolkien works in 1976, Amazon was able to buy TV series rights directly from the Tolkien estate for a staggering $250 million, due to an eight-episode loophole in the deal.

As Amazon prepares to premiere its most-expensive TV series adaptation of Lord of the Rings saga, titled Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the company is supposedly one of the prime candidates seeking to purchase Zaentz’s rights.

The Amazon series will take the viewers to witness the forging of the original rings of power, a thousand years before the events of The Hobbit and LOTR.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set to premiere on Prime Video on September 2, 2022.

About The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is an American TV series, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, developed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay for streaming on Amazon Prime. 

Set 3,000 years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the show will be set in the Second Age of Middle-earth. Beginning with a time of peace, the series will follow the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron and the forging of the rings of power.

The cast includes Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, and Dylan Smith among many others.