Warner Bros. Discovery is hoping to mine more box office gold from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Middle Earth. Variety reports that during an earnings call with CEO David Zaslav on Thursday, the executive announced that subsidiary New Line Cinema will be producing multiple Lord of the Rings movies, as it did for Peter Jackson‘s Oscar-winning trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), its 2002 follow-up The Two Towers, and 2003’s The Return of the King grossed more than $3 billion worldwide, with the last film winning a record-tying 11 trophies at the 96th Annual Academy Awards.
Jackson returned to Middle Earth for a prequel trilogy based on Tolkein’s The Hobbit. While those films weren’t as critically-acclaimed as the other trilogy, 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2013’s The Desolation of Smaug, and 2014’s The Battle of the Five Armies grossed nearly $3 billion globally.
Tolkien’s work was recently adapted into Amazon’s expensive, divisive series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
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