For the price of at least $2 billion dollars, some company is going to own the movie, merchandising, gaming and live event rights to "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit". Current owner of those rights, Saul Zaentz Co. who handles Tolkien related licensing through its Middle Earth Enterprises, is selling those rights.
The rights where purchased way back in 1976 by now deceased Saul Zaentz from the Tolkien estate. This was at a time when the value of intellectual property (IP) wasn't quite known and perpetual ownership was common. Nowadays most IP rights have some form of expiration date. For example, if Sony doesn't make a Spider-Man film every 2 or so years, the rights will revert back to Disney. This is why the franchise has been rebooted so frequently. Since LOTR and The Hobbit didn't have such reversion clauses, whoever buys them can make money from them essentially to the end of time.
A rather major wrinkle is Warner Bros. also claims ownership of those rights due to their owner of New Line Cinema who financed The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Saul Zaentz Co believes the movie making rights reverted 100% to them but all that really means is whoever buys the rights from them will have a litigation headache to deal with unless they can reach their own deal with Warner Bros. Its also unclear how they can exploit the movie rights any further as a "reboot" seems ridiculous. Still the existing movie, merchandising, video game rights will be a perpetual money machine even without any new movies. Technically WB could bid on the rights but its unclear if they have the capital to do it. Amazon is more than likely is going to wind up with them since Jeff Bezos is a huge Tolkien fan and could prove useful in conjunction with their upcoming Rings of Power television show.
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