What’s coming next?
Guinchard said the work is still in motion.
“We’re in the middle of it, the whole creative thing,” he said.
It isn’t a rush job. It’s a journey to figure out how to do the best work. This is a necessary step to take the franchise to the next level.
“If you treat everything just like a bunch of rights all the time, and a bunch of transactions, you get average,” Guinchard said. “This part of the group is going to be focused on building long-term intellectual property, with its creators, and with other creators, as well. We use the words Middle-earth & Friends because it is really about the IP. It’s all about the IP. That’s the one thing that we’ve got a lot of opportunities for building out in a very Middle-earth way. What does the next chapter mean? This is like the torchlight in the middle of the journey.”
The question Guinchard is wrestling with is what does the IP mean in the modern world? How does the company do justice to them? There are offshoots that can happen like The Mandalorian managed to achieve for the revival of Star Wars. Whatever is done, it has to be authentic.
The grand plan
In recent years, with no new movies in the works and a war among the rights holders, the franchise was reaching just millions of users. Middle-earth Enterprises wants to reach billions. In the past, it was focused on North America and Europe. But he wants it to be global.
Projects should be planned out with a schedule so they fit and work together. There will be a central repository of IP canon aligning forward. And the focus will be on high quality, not mixed results like we have seen in recent years.
To accomplish this, Middle-earth Enterprises will retain oversight on the projects and the IP. It will take a strategic approach to partners, both inside Embracer and among external teams. It will do this with games. It has an exclusive partnership on movies with Warner Bros./New Line Cinema. And it will work with a wide variety of merchandise companies and lean heavily on Warner.
Of course, Roblox or Fortnite players would love mash-ups of IP, like with Ready Player One. Guinchard said you should never rule out such things as time progresses. But it takes time to figure such things out.
The job is to build value for the IP, and that value only gets created if you build great products, he said. If you make small mistakes, fans can be forgiving. You just don’t want to make a lot. From my point of view, that makes me think about Gollum, which got poor reviews.
Guinchard is the ringleader, but he said there are a lot of people in the group and a lot that the company is working with. He’s not revealing a lot of details yet.
“They know who they are, we know who they are. And their focus on what matters is what’s important for the long term,” he said. “We have had to get on the other side of this last few months (of layoffs and company structure announcements) and actually start to build. The folks that have lost their jobs in the industry, as well as our own process, is heartbreaking. The people in a creative world pour their heart and souls into this work. It’s the way these economic cycles work. It’s tough.”
Embracer Freemode is a cash generating business already. At the moment, it is self-sufficient.
“I’m very confident that this will be something quite special from a product perspective again,” he said. “But it doesn’t do us any favors to come out and say a load of stuff to get (attention). It has to get to a point where you’ve actually got something to say in an execution sense,” he said.
The ambition is big like the modern way that the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars has been handled at Disney. But Guinchard is thinking about developing the central hub and how it means slightly different things in The Lord of the Rings universe. In that way, he won’t make a direct comparison to other franchises.
“I think Tolkien has already set the stage for Middle-earth, and all the tales and all the beginnings, the tribulations, the drama. They’re all set up in a fully fleshed-out world. Marvel came from comic books, so there was a lot of work to do to make the lore for the movies,” Guinchard said.
He added, “You start to visualize Middle-earth in your own way. When you see the animated films, and some of the Peter Jackson, which wasn’t actually what I imagined, I was still quite happy to. It’s already preset, down on paper in the written word. The interesting thing is how we go and tell the story in the future for these new media like video games and all of this new technology for how people immerse themselves in worlds. That’s where I’m super interested.”
While the written word is clear, the visual interpretation is up for grabs. There are so many different kinds of art styles, Guinchard said, with the look of things like Fortnite, Borderlands, GTA, Tomb Raider and more. The teams will have to figure out what Frodo looks like and more. And if an Asian audience is looking at a version of The Lord of the Rings property in the future, how would it be visualized for them? That is what you have to think about when you envision a global market.
“As we move forward in society and have all these amazing ways of consuming great entertainment, I skirt around the point of this central hub. I’d like to think that what we build here is that central hub,” Guinchard said. “But the difference is we have a great collection of world-class creators all riffing with each other, whether that be the folks in New Zealand, the folks at great studios (the Amazons), the fans — what we have to strive to be here in this next evolution of being is the connective tissue with everything doing the right things by people who matter. All of this becomes useful to the universe.”
Last edited:
