In the construction of new digital spaces, whose protagonists will be blockchain technology, smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFT), several world-renowned companies have decided to join in.
On October 21, 2022, Warner Bros. NFT released The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. To do so, it launched its own Movieverse platform, which is backed by Eluvio, a Web3 multimedia company.
There, people can still buy the Premiere Mystery Edition for $30 (and for about half that on the secondary market), which includes the extended version of the film in 4K, as well as a number of immersive extras. The Premiere Epic Edition, which includes exclusive material, sold out on the same day of release.
As Almudena de la Mata, founder of Blockchain Intelligence and President of the Blockchain Intelligence Law Institute, explains in her paper “Metaversos: Blockchain y seguridad jurídica”, published in Diario La Ley on April 8, 2022, NFTs are the new digital products of metaverses.
“Metaverses link all this infrastructure or digital tools for value exchange with interfaces that facilitate human access through virtual reality tools. It is about accessing in a very visual and immersive way a new world of relationship and contracting, with real legal and proprietary effects.”
It should come as no surprise that Warner and more production companies of its size follow the path of tokenizing such emblematic works as The Lord of The Rings. The saga, which was published thanks to the creative mind of J. R. R. R. Tolkien in the middle of the last century, has a worldwide fan community, which does not arise with the NFT phenomenon.
On the contrary, thanks to these new technologies, which converge in the creation of various metaverses, fans of Tolkien’s work can now experience in a unique way the film that introduced us to the Shire, Sauron and the All-Seeing Eye (so relevant to our time).
Undoubtedly, the Warner Bros. NFT collection marks a precedent in the history of the Web3 Cultural Industry. This, because it will be the cultural industries such as music and film that will really drive the integration of non-fungible tokens at the user level.
It remains to wait for Warner to release the two remaining films of LOTR: The Two Towers and The Return of the King, so that users can enjoy this magnificent work of the seventh art in a unique way.
The fact that Warner Bros. has decided to call its platform “Movieverse” is a sign that it aims to develop a Metaverse using its huge collection of movies. And for movie buffs, it is an opportunity to enjoy movies in a new way, whose ownership and authenticity of the product is represented on the blockchain.