Lord of the Rings Rights: Coming Home?

Variety’s Blog is reporting that the video game rights to The Lord of the Rings have returned to Warner Bros. - or at least that is how it looks. EA’s rights to the popular franchise expired at the end of last year, but EA managed to wrangle an extension in March of last year with license holder Tolkien Enterprises until the end of 2008 so that it could finish work on Pandemic’s The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.

With that game released in January of this year, the rights to LOTR were in question. EA held those rights for seven years, with the only games made outside the company being Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online MMO games (Warner Bros. holds an equity stake in Turbine).

So now that Warner Bros. has the rights back, it makes logical sense that its video game development and publishing unit, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, would take the reins and use the license to create some unique games. Variety uses some logic and some inside sources to come to this conclusion, and it is hard to argue that this isn’t where the license is going.

The question is, what will Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment do with these rights? With two “Hobbit” movies in the works at New Line - which are being produced for MGM for 2011 and 2012 - you can bet some game tie-ins are planned.

thanks, Variety.