It was a strange weekend at the box office considering that Moana 2 and Wicked continued to dominate theaters even though movies attached to major franchises like Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings debuted. Kraven The Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, both bombed, which was not unexpected. For the former film, it reportedly spells the end of Sony’s Spider-Verse adjacent franchise. But it's reportedly not a big deal for the anime-inspired Lord of the Rings movie.
You’d be forgiven for not even realizing that this past weekend saw an animated Lord of the Rings film release, set two centuries before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic. The movie wasn’t broadly promoted, and it only cost $30 million to make, a drop in the bucket when your average Disney or Pixar endeavor costs around $200 million. It's claimed even the studio is only hoping the movie might break even. It feels like Warner Bros. didn’t care if anybody saw this movie, and actually, that may be the case.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim May Have Been Made Retain The Rights
In a story from Variety remarking on the film’s substandard performance, it barely outperformed Red One at the box office, which this weekend was free if you had a Prime Video subscription, it’s suggested that the reason that The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was made wasn’t to be a successful movie in its own right, but simply to retain the rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise for Warner Bros.
Peter Jackson is working on a pair of new live-action movies, with Andy Serkis set to star in and direct Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum. However, most deals between IP holders and studios have time limits and require that the IP be used regularly, or the rights revert to the original owner.
It’s been a decade since The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies opened in theaters and the new Gollum movie is at least two years away, likely more. While we don’t know exactly what the rights deal with WB is, it's certainly possible that the time limit is close. Without a plan for more movies back when the anime movie was given the green light, one could see how a studio might spend a few million to get something out to have the opportunity to make millions, or billions, on something better later.
The War of the Rohirrim Isn’t The First Movie To Be Made For This Reason
If the rights were the primary driver behind The War of the Rohirrim being made, and to be clear, nobody is saying for certain that's what happened here, it would be far from the first time that had been the case. It’s happened before and for some equally high-profile properties.
There’s a reason that after plans for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 fell apart Sony turned around and rebooted the franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man as quickly as it did. Similarly, movies in the Hellraiser and Children of the Corn franchises saw direct-to-DVD releases of subpar movies, even for overworked horror franchises, just because something was better than losing the rights.
Most famously, Fox hired Roger Corman to direct a Fantastic Four movie in the mid-'90s because the studio hadn’t gotten around to making that one yet and needed to produce a film to keep the rights. The movie was never officially released. It was never meant to be.
If Peter Jackson’s new films come out in a few years and set the box office on fire, as they are surely expected to do, the $30 million spent on The War of the Rohirrim will be a drop in the bucket; it will be seen as a necessary investment in the franchise.