The only fly in the ointment might be that the licence is currently held with Warner Brothers' gaming division (who produced Shadows of Mordor and Shadows of War) and it is unclear if they would be willing to sub-licence the property to another studio.ĬA also note that they have been in discussions with Netflix over a new project. With Lord of the Rings back in the zeitgeist, courtesy of the new Second Age-set TV show from Amazon Prime, it seems a good time to revisit the concept and with more money and the success of two (soon to be three) Warhammer games behind them, Creative Assembly can make a good case for acquiring the licence.
I suspect that the Warhammer mod was significantly cheaper to acquire. This is interesting because two of the biggest fan mods for Medieval II: Total War (the last Total War game which allowed total conversion mods, effectively creating brand-new games out of older ones) were Call of Warhammer and The Third Age: Total War, mods for those two respective worlds.
In the documentary, CA confirm that before securing the Warhammer licence from Games Workshop, they were actively pursuing and discussing a Lord of the Rings licence.
