Well, that was fast. New Line Cinema’s anime feature The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which opened on Dec. 13 to a very low $4.5M, will be available on digital in home on Dec. 27, repping a 14-day theatrical window.
War of the Rohirrim will be available on all participating digital platforms including Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Fandango at Home, and more. Note, just because the movie is available in home, doesn’t mean it won’t continue to play in theaters. That said, there’s a competition this Christmas with Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Mufasa, Wicked and Moana 2, and it will be very hard to hold screens on a movie that didn’t perform well.
The $30M animated production fell 72% in its second weekend with $1.25M for a $7.3M running total. Warners greenlit the movie before Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy took control of the motion picture studio to keep the rights alive with Lord of the Rings holder Embracer Group. A Lord of the Rings feature needs to be made every so many years, the being 10 years ago, with the third part of The Hobbit, The Battle of Five Armies. The six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies combined have grossed $6 billion and won 17 Oscars for New Line.
The first of two new LOTR films at Warner — working title Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum — are in the works with Andy Serkis starring and directing, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are writing along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou (Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim). EPs are Ken Kamins, Serkis and The Imaginarium’s Jonathan Cavendish. Original Hobbit and LOTR filmmaker Peter Jackson is producing with Walsh and Boyens.
War of the Rohirrim is set 183 years before the events chronicled in the original trilogy of Lord of the Rings films. Pic tells the saga of the legendary House of Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. When a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord attacks seeking vengeance for the death of his father, Helm’s daughter Héra must summon the will to lead the resistance or face total destruction. Kenji Kamiyama directs (Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series.
Special content on digital for War of the Rohirrim includes
–Return to Helm’s Deep: History Becomes Legend
–Middle-earth and Anime: A Marriage of Creativity
__Héra: A New Hero for Middle-earth
