New Line Cinema
- Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said the media giant would work on new "Lord of the Rings" movies.
- Warner Bros. struck a deal with the video game company that owns the film rights to Tolkien's books.
- Warner Bros.' plan to revive the films comes amid the company reporting declining revenues.
Middle-earth fans, rejoice: Warner Bros. announced plans to make more "Lord of the Rings" films.
New Line Cinema, the Warner Bros.-owned production company behind the original "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films, struck a deal with Swedish gaming company Embracer Group, which currently owns the film rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's books.
The new films were announced by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav on the media giant's fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday and first detailed in The Hollywood Reporter.
This isn't the first time a Warner Bros. property wanted to try again at adapting the original trilogy: HBO once reportedly pitched a show that would essentially re-tell some of the same stories from the original films, but Tolkien's estate rejected the idea.
With additional WBD movies, Tolkien fans will have multiple options when it comes to adaptations of the famed author's epic fantasy novels: Amazon's big-budget TV show, "Rings of Power," is based on the same source material.
WBD also reported quarterly results on Thursday. Revenues declined 9% to hit $11 billion for the quarter, slightly below Wall Street's expectations of $11.3 billion. The company reported an earnings loss of $2.1 billion, or 86 cents per share.
A big driver of the decline was the TV networks segment, which includes CNN, TBS, and HGTV and whose revenue declined 6% to $5.5 billion on a 14% drop in ad revenue.
WBD's studio division revenue fell 23% to $3.8 billion, which the company attributed to lower TV licensing revenue as well as lower games revenue versus COVID-driven gains the year prior; and lower home entertainment revenue due to fewer theatrical releases.
On the direct-to-consumer front, WBD, which operates the HBO Max and Discovery+ streaming services, reported streaming subscribers increased 1.1 million to 96.1 million in the fourth quarter versus 95 million at the end of Q3, helped in part by the re-launch of HBO Max on Amazon Channels in December.