In actuality, those rights are coming up for auction from the Saul Zaentz Co, The rights were acquired by the late Zaentz back in 1976, the first film to arise from them being Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation of the first book-and-a-half of the trilogy in the form of 1978's Lord of the Rings.
Out of the gate the expectation is that Amazon will likely pursue those rights, which are expected to net about $2 billion. The streaming company, of course, paid the Tolkien estate $250 million just for the ability to produce their forhtcoming prequel series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Amazon and the estate were able to exploit a loophole in the Zaentz contract which limited them to a TV series of eight episodes or less. The rights being auctioned include not only films and limited TV shows, but video games, merchandising, theme parks and live events as well.
The question of course, is whether or not the audience will be willing to accept new versions of such a beloved trilogy as Peter Jackson's take on LOTR.
Between 1955 and 1981 there were four radio versions of the trilogy produced; on television there were three animated musical adventures in the form of Rankin/Bass' The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and Return of the King (1980); Bakshi's version in 1978, Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003), plus his Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).
Back in 1978, long before CG was even a thing, Zaentz explained to The Cincinnati Post why the choice was made to do the film in animation rather than live action: "The book is total fantasy and its characters such as the Hobbits do not exist. To cast the Hobbits with live actors would have been difficult — where do you find eight or 10 midgets who could act? And live actors woul have dispelled the fantasy anyway." Needless to say, two decades later technology would prove Zaentz wrong.
Look for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to start streaming on Amazon September 2nd.