Fans of “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” can look forward to new film material from Middle-earth. In cooperation with the Embracer Group, the US production company New Line Cinema wants to bring more stories from the literary world of JRR Tolkien to the big screen. This was announced by New Line’s parent company Warner Bros together with the Embracer Group on Thursday (local time).
The Swedish games group Embracer took over the company Middle-earth Enterprises last year and has since owned the film rights for the literary work regarding “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”, as reported by the “Hollywood Reporter”. New Line had already co-produced the sagas, each of which was released as a trilogy from 2001 to 2014 with great success.
It is still unknown which storylines or characters might be the focus of new productions. Referring to the films already in existence, Warner Bros said: “The vast, complex and dazzling universe dreamed up by JRR Tolkien remains largely unexplored as a film.” The head of Embracer’s Freecode production company, Lee Guinchard, envisioned a “new and exciting way” of bringing Tolkien’s literature back to the screen.
The TV rights are still with the US multinational Amazon. Its Prime streaming service broadcast the first season of its Middle-earth series “The Rings of Power” in 2022. Its content is set as a prehistory several thousand years before the events of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Even if the reviews at the start of the extremely expensive production were mixed, the second season is already in the works.
