Here’s what Embracer Group can (and can’t) do with Lord of the Rings

theverge.com:

Embracer Group’s purchase of Middle-earth Enterprises opens up a wealth of opportunities to put all kinds of new spins on the characters, stories, and places of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I am a horse girl at heart, and so a video game company purchasing the various rights to the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit universe means my dreams of a horse game involving the Rohirrim are that much closer to fruition. But Embracer didn’t just buy the gaming rights to Middle-earth; it bought (almost) all the rights. What else can Embracer do with all those juicy IPs, and how much of Middle-earth does the Swedish holding group own?

Short answer: no. Long answer: Nooooooo. To be clear, book publishing rights still belong to the Tolkien family, as does anything to do with The Silmarillion and Tolkien’s other posthumously published works. Warner Bros. also retains some feature-length production rights as a part of the license it obtained from Middle-earth Enterprises (back when it was known as Tolkien Enterprises) in the late 1990s. That’s how we got the Peter Jackson movies and why we’re getting The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim animated feature due in 2024. Warner Bros., as a part of its licensing deal, likely has to keep producing LotR media lest they risk the rights returning to its original owners. (Amazon’s The Rings of Power TV show also skirts around this deal, with it having come to an agreement directly with the Tolkien estate.

Middle-earth Enterprises, according to its website, “owns exclusive worldwide rights to motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights in certain literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.” This means Embracer can pick from any one of its