With Season 2 of The Rings of Power imminent and The War of the Rohirrim and The Hunt for Gollum set to hit theaters soon, Amazon and WB are at war.

While The Lord of the Rings has been a staple of fantasy storytelling for over half a century now, it has just been over the last 25 years that the series has become a cinematic juggernaut. Six feature films based on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien have been released over the previous 25 years, beginning with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, and every single one has done incredible business at the box office. Two entries, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, while the other four have landed between $890 million and $960 million. With astronomical success like that, it’s no wonder why there’s so much desire to continue expanding the franchise on-screen.

However, how the franchise is being expanded on-screen isn’t all that simple. This is because the adaptation rights to Tolkien’s work do not lie exclusively with one studio. While Warner Bros. has the rights to adapt stories from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit into feature films, the television rights for the same stories currently lie with Amazon. The result is that these two competing studios are actively developing and releasing two different versions of Middle Earth. While WB is building its films around the trilogy directed by Peter Jackson in the early 2000s, Amazon has launched The Rings of Power on Prime Video, which brings an entirely separate continuity to life. Here’s how this war over The Lord of the Rings came to be and how it affects both takes on the franchise.

Two Competing Lord of the Rings Series

WB and New Line Cinema first launched The Lord of the Rings as a film franchise in the early 2000s, with the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies directed by Jackson. The success of this film trilogy cannot be understated. They were some of the defining films of the decade, and the trilogy is still revered as some of the finest fantasy filmmaking of the century so far. This success rolled into another trilogy a decade later, the three-film adaptation of The Hobbit, also directed by Jackson, released in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively. While these movies did not achieve the same critical acclaim as The Lord of the Rings, they demonstrated an immense desire from audiences to return to Tolkien’s world.

After the release of The Hobbit, things were silent for a few years, and it seemed like the Lord of the Rings franchise may have been at an end. However, in the late 2010s, Amazon struck a deal that would allow them to develop original television and streaming series based on Tolkien’s most famous books. This eventually yielded The Rings of Power, which debuted in the summer of 2022 and tackled the epic stories of Middle Earth’s Second Age (thousands of years before the story of The Lord of the Rings). Because WB owns all the rights to their specific Lord of the Rings adaptations, this new Prime Video series was not legally allowed to be connected to the existing films, forcing it to establish a new continuity to tell its story, essentially operating as a franchise reboot.

The reception to The Rings of Power was not stellar, though its strong viewership numbers once again indicated an intense hunger from audiences for more Middle Earth stories on-screen. WB recognized this and set out to continue expanding its existing Lord of the Rings film franchise, which began with Jackson’s trilogy.

The first film of these renewed efforts will be The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated prequel centered on a legendary King of Rohan, arriving in theaters later this year. Additionally, two new live-action films have been announced as well. One of these will be titled The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, and it features Andy Serkis reprising the titular role and directing the feature.

How Peter Jackson Is Involved in the New Lord of the Rings

Given that the modern cinematic life of The Lord of the Rings began with Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, the question of his involvement in this war between Amazon and WB is an important one. After he directed the Hobbit trilogy in the early 2010s, Jackson indicated that he was finished working in the world of Middle Earth. He largely disappeared from the spotlight, only reappearing on a couple of occasions with new documentary films that he had directed, including the World War I doc They Shall Not Grow Old in 2018 and the eight-hour Beatles docuseries The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+ in late 2021.

When Amazon began developing The Rings of Power in the late 2010s, initial reports indicated that the studio was keen on bringing Jackson aboard. While the series could not connect to the specific continuity of the films he’d already directed, that didn’t mean the director was barred from contributing to this new series. Jackson has spoken about his potential involvement in the series, saying that Amazon contacted him about his assistance in developing the scripts and overall production.

However, the director says that the studio simply stopped responding to him early in their conversations, indicating that the creatives behind the Prime Video series had decided to move forward without him. The director harbored no negative feelings about this, saying, “I’ll be watching it. I’m not the sort of guy who wishes ill will.”

Though Jackson is not involved with Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, he has returned to the world of Middle Earth as a part of WB’s newest film aspirations for the franchise. He is not involved with The War of the Rohirrim, but he has signed on as a producer for both The Hunt for Gollum and the as-of-yet untitled second live-action Lord of the Rings film. When the films were announced, WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav was quick to confirm that Jackson, as well as his collaborators Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, “will be involved every step of the way.”

Will Competition Help The Lord of the Rings?

While both Amazon and WB’s Lord of the Rings franchise have been in development concurrently, they have yet to really be put to the test against one another. While the first season of The Rings of Power premiered back in 2022, it did so with plenty of separation between itself and the competing WB films. It followed eight years after the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and there were no immediate film releases that followed it. However, the first direct competition between WB and Amazon in the Middle Earth arena is set to occur this year, as Prime Video will likely be debuting Season 2 of The Rings of Power late this summer, only a few months before The War of the Rohirrim is set to open in theaters.

Producing two different Lord of the Rings franchises like this will likely go one of two ways. The first possibility is that it could result in a broader increase of interest in both series. As the old adage goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. If both these new Lord of the Rings outputs are great, they will benefit from one another, as more goodwill for the franchise will be built. The first season of The Rings of Power does not go out of its way to show that it’s a different franchise than Jackson’s films, so many audiences are likely completely unaware of the difference between these competing Tolkien adaptations. So, if the second season of The Rings of Power is incredible, it’ll likely generate more interest in The War of the Rohirrim.

However, the opposite effect is also a solid possibility. These two different Lord of the Rings franchises could very easily end up harming one another, as it is spreading the existing audience too thin. We’ve already seen the effects that producing too many stories has had on both the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, as general audiences have lost a ton of interest as they have begun to be engulfed in a never-ending stream of new content from both franchises.

The Lord of the Rings is not immune to this. Both WB and Amazon need to be careful to ensure they aren’t over-flooding the world with new Lord of the Rings stories because audiences may very well lose interest in the franchise as a whole if they do. The Lord of the Rings film franchise is streaming on Max. The Rings of Power is streaming on Prime Video.