Ian McKellen was famously miserable about the excess green screen use in The Hobbit.
Ian McKellen was famously miserable about the excess green screen use in The Hobbit.
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Embracer Group acquires rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit via Middle-earth Enterprises

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

Video game conglomerate Embracer Group has agreed to acquire the intellectual property rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit literary works by J.R.R Tolkien.

It will do so by acquiring a secondary fights holder, Middle-earth Enterprises, which acquired the rights to motion pictures, video games, board games and other rights back in the 1970s. Peter Jackson was able to make his Oscar-winning movies based on licenses that went back to Middle-earth Enterprises.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.