Warner Bros. Takes Down LOTR Fan Film From 2009, Apologizes, Puts It Back Up
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.