Warner Bros. Takes Down LOTR Fan Film From 2009, Apologizes, Puts It Back Up
from the ready-fire-aim dept
Way back in 2009, we discussed a very impressive fan film called The Hunt for Gollum. While the film was made by dedicated fans of the Lord of the Rings films and was non-commercial in nature, we openly speculated both what the copyright implications of the film and whether there would be any risk of a takedown or lawsuit over it. We noted at the time that that seemed unlikely, given that the person leading the project reached out to Tolkien Enterprises and was granted approval for the film, so long as it remained a non-profit project. The film has been celebrated by LoTR fans for the past fifteen years.
Fast forward to the present. Warner Bros. recently announced a new film, which has the working title of Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. I’ll tell you what happened next, but you’ve probably already guessed.
A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube.
“Video unavailable,” the video hosted on Independent Online Cinema’s YouTube channel temporarily said. “This video contains content from Warner Bros. Entertainment, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”
“That’s so lame,” one Reddit user wrote, dissing Warner Bros. as “greedy f**ks” that “can’t help but hoard every penny, like Smaug. The video already had 13 million views and was peacefully existing for all these years.”
Not exactly the best way to ingratiate LoTR fans to this new film, Warner Bros.
Now, to its credit, the studio very quickly reversed the takedown on all of this and the film is once again back up on YouTube. Nobody has confirmed at this time if the takedown notice was manually sent as a result of a WB lawyer somewhere, or whether there was some sort of automatic takedown that was triggered due to the similarity in the film’s names. Either way, it’s bad. Warner Bros. should know the ecosystem in which it is playing and this fan-film is very much a known quantity. Even a mistaken takedown is a bad look.
Either way, nobody from the common internet person up to the Ivy League understands why studios do this sort of thing.
In 2019, the Harvard Business Review noted that “until recently, companies have largely tolerated individuals who seek to bring their fictional worlds to life, on the theory that going after one’s fans is not good for business.”
“Overreaching by companies can threaten creativity, competition, fan goodwill, and, more fundamentally, the freedom to play and ‘geek out’ about the stories we love,” HBR warned.
At least one Redditor agreed with this viewpoint, posting, “I will never understand moves like this. Literally no one will pass on watching the movie because some fan film exists. Same with gaming companies that take down every fan project (Nintendo obviously). I‘ve read before, that it is to protect the IP, but other companies encourage that stuff and don’t lose the IP.”
Again, Warner Bros. acted quickly and reinstated the film. But I really don’t have much interest in showering an arson with praise just because they stuck around to help put the fire out.
It would be nice if, instead, studios would just realize that fan projects like this not only don’t do any harm to the studios, but actually help foster a wider fandom for those films such that it makes them even more attractive to fans.
Filed Under: copyright, fair use, fan films, hunt for gollum, lord of the rings, takedowns
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Warner Bros. Takes Down LOTR Fan Film From 2009, Apologizes, Puts It Back Up”
“Again, Warner Bros. acted quickly and reinstated the film. But I really don’t have much interest in showering an arson with praise just because they stuck around to help put the fire out.”
And this is a problem for Warner, because while a smaller creator would easily be able to rack up some goodwill by pulling back on the copyright enforcement, Warner’s developed such a reputation as a maximalist that even this pullback can’t really be looked at without at least a grain of salt and a lot of cynicism.
Really though, Warner earned this reputation. They thought they could hide behind copyright law and automated takedowns and be free of criticism, they were wrong.
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I’m not sure that’s actually what happened. It seems they saw the title of the YouTube vid but not the date it was originally posted because they have so much IP they put bots on the job. Why do you think they retracted the claim once the issue was brought to their attention?
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Agreed. And as I said elsewhere, this little gaffe likely did more to publicize both films than any marketing budget could do. After all, now everybody’s going to go watch the fan film, and then line up to watch the feature film when it comes out. I hadn’t heard about the feature film at all before this, and had forgotten about the fan film having not watched it since 2009.
Sanctioned by House of Tolkien, but Warner thinks they own the space. Good job on so many levels.
It doesn't work that way
There is no such thing as “studios realizing” anything. Large studios are a collection of departments working with only loose synchronization, and beyond a certain size, the legal department largely runs on autopilot. They have only thin connections to marketing and the creative department.
That means that the legal actions are to a significant degree professional, standardized, and clueless.
That is a side effect of how corporations are constituted and operated.
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Which is a problem, since the value of a legal department is in getting all the details right. If they don’t do that, if they aren’t also competent, it doesn’t matter how ‘professional’ or ‘standardized’ they are.
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Repercussions are not details but consequences. You cannot really research them, you’ve got to predict them, and the skill and knowledge set for those may mostly be in a different department that has other things to do than to network with Legal.
It’s really tricky to sustain a corporate identity that is more than the sum of its departments.
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But remember: the legal department’s mandate is to enable the corporation to earn the largest amount of money possible while minimizing liability.
Since companies like Warner Bros operate at a huge scale, mistakes like this can happen daily without impacting that mandate. Nobody’s going to sue WB over this, and the system they have in place that caused the FP is generating more money than the lawyers cost.
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I hope Warner Bros. takes a thoughtful approach that acknowledges the film’s history and avoids unnecessary confrontation with the four colors. Striking the right balance between protecting intellectual property and fostering fan creativity is an ongoing challenge, but one that progressive media companies should strive to address.
Actually, that’s not surprising to me. Round about 12 years ago, I put a Chipmunkised version of the song on YouTube and Warner Chappell Music put a claim on it. Not wanting them to put adverts on the video I’d posted (which was an option back then), I challenged the claim by saying my version of the song was a parody even though it didn’t enjoy that legal status at that time, and Warner immediately dropped its claim, no criticism necessary.
I won’t not watch this movie because of Warner Brothers actions. I’ll not watch this movie because I expect any studio (including WB) to do the same shitty job extending LOTR that Disney did to Star Wars.
Malice, or just incompetence?
I see this as just another incompetence story — “don’t attribute to malice something that can be explained as incompetence”. Nobody at WB who was dealing with the new release likely knew about the fan film at all (different departments for new releases vs. IP protection), so their automated protection systems weren’t told about it and immediately kicked in once activated.
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Trusting any automated system do do its job perfectly and without supervision is a mistake that keeps costing them good will and reputation. I will not give WB a pass on this because they have the budget to put people to work reviewing these takedown notices before they go out.
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Why not both dot gif
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It’s malice.
They made a deliberate policy choice that copyright enforcement actions should not be checked for legal validity prior to being performed and they are consistently acting in accordance with that policy choice.
Incompetence is when somebody does something poorly because of a lack of education and training, not when somebody does something poorly because it requires less effort. The latter is malice.
I think this is one of the few mistakes a human could make
Of all the outrageous things that happened in the name of copyright, this feels like one of the least egregious.
I mean, come on: imagine you’re one of the interns just spamming takedowns for pirated movies every day, and some of those videos having weird thumbnails so eventually you just get numb to it. I could totally see this as an example of human error, and at least it was corrected.
I’d put the onus on whoever was in charge of naming things for apparently not bothering to google their title idea to see if somebody else had already come up with something similar. One might assume that such a specific title for an IP was unclaimed, but one would be wrong.