There's been a lot of speculation surrounding who holds which rights to The Lord of the Rings franchise. Last year, New Line Cinema renewed its 25-year-old license with Middle-earth Enterprises, a company now owned by Embracer Group.
They immediately made plans to develop a new slate of movies, with the first of those recently confirmed to be Andy Serkis' The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.
Amazon, on the other hand, negotiated directly with the Tolkien Estate for rights the family still held outside of anything New Line, MEE or Embracer, explaining why The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a "prequel" to the movies released on streaming rather than in theaters.
Interestingly, both New Line and Amazon can now use the same characters...just at different times in their lives. Talking to Deadline (via SFFGazette.com), movie producer and writer Philippa Boyens addressed any potential clashes with the Prime Video series.
"There’s room enough for lots of people to exist within that space," she said. "We’ve never wanted to be the gatekeepers of Middle Earth. Sometimes other people put you in that position, but we don’t feel that. Honestly, I haven’t seen any of it. I didn’t want to go watch too much, because I genuinely didn’t want to be influenced."
"But I think it’s a fantastic era, as a choice. The making of the rings of power is a brilliant piece of storytelling. It’s a great era, full of fascinating characters."
"We have the right to the Lord of the Rings and the appendices, and that’s it," Boyens clarified. "I would love to see that expand if there was the opportunity to do so, but there is so much that is in those three books...look at War of the Rohirrim. It’s a page and a half at first glance in the books. But there are lots of threads in there throughout the book."
With only the main books to play with, The Lord of the Rings movies will be restricted to expanding small moments like that into big screen stories, meaning much of what we see moving forward will have to be largely original material.
That doesn't mean tales like The War of the Rohirrim won't be worth exploring, according to Boyens.
"War of the Rohirrim sits 200 years before the events of the ring, and it really is a standalone story," she says. "It was one of the reasons that I came to that story when we were looking to do something that would fit with anime. We wanted to do something that really had nothing to do with rings of power or Sauron or the Dark Tower or wizards, even."
"It’s a story about a people who are tearing themselves apart. So that felt like a really good fit, not only for anime, but to go into a new art form which anime is, and try and tell a story based in Middle-earth without touching really upon the live action films, if that makes sense."
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrives in theaters on December 13, with The Hunt for Gollum set to follow in 2026.