This marks a substantial shift in the Tolkien Estate's position. J.R.R. Tolkien himself sold the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 to generate funds for his grandchildren's education. Tolkien had despaired after earlier approaches for a film version of varying degrees of daftness, adopting a "cash or kudos" approach: either a highly respectable, artistic film or a huge amount of money. The animated Hobbit and Lord of the Rings adaptations, and Peter Jackson's two movie trilogies, were derived from these rights. He did not sell the rights to The Silmarillion since it was unfinished and unpublished; in the event, it was not published until 1977, four years after Tolkien's passing.
However, the Estate, under the stewardship of Tolkien's youngest son Christopher, stridently opposed approaches for additional rights, meaning that The Silmarillion and later books using Tolkien's hitherto unpublished writings, like Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth series, were off-limits. Back in 2017, Christopher Tolkien retired and the Estate relented enough to allow additional, small rights (such as material related to the island kingdom of Númenor) to be licensed by Amazon for their Rings of Power TV series. Since Christopher Tolkien's passing in 2020, it appears that the Estate may have become more amenable to discussions.
To be clear, no new deal has been signed and Peter Jackson has only committed to saying that discussions have and will continue to happen, with the new composition of the Estate (including family members who actually appeared in Jackson's movie trilogy in cameo roles, earning some ire from the older members in the process) more open to at least discussing ideas. Warner Brothers have also gotten involved in some of those discussions.
The Silmarillion is unlikely to ever be adapted in full itself, being too dense and vast in scope, but one can easily imagine pulling episodes out and expanding them into films. Indeed, Tolkien himself did this with several narratives that his son Christopher later published as discrete books, resulting in the volumes The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin.
If it came to pass, it might address a major problem for Warner Brothers in trying to create more Middle-earth films. The Lord of the Rings is, by far, the meatiest thing Tolkien ever wrote. Splitting the far slimmer Hobbit into three big movies resulted in an overlong and tedious work lacking much of the charm of the original book. The in-development movies The Hunt for Gollum and The Shadow of the Past sound mildly ridiculous, taking very short episodes from Lord of the Rings (one mostly occurring off-page as well) and trying to make full movies out of them. And Amazon have likewise found with Rings of Power that trying to fill a lot of screen-time with a paucity of source material can easily backfire on you.
The Silmarillion wouldn't necessarily be a slam-dunk success either. The work is tragic and bittersweet, with the "good" guys frequently losing battles against the evil, original Dark Lord Morgoth (of whom Sauron is a middling-at-best servant), and the "good guys" often riven by internal conflicts against one another rather than the true foe. There are also, very strictly, no Hobbits in the work, and humans do not play a major role until halfway or more through the narrative. This might be a harder sell than the original Lord of the Rings. Still, at least it would be a more sensible idea than some of the other attempts to make more Middle-earth material. More developments as they are reported.
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