Warner Brothers’ Virtual Collectibles

Each NFT includes a digital copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as bonus material, such as behind-the-scenes featurettes and image galleries. This mirrors the sort of extra content that has been traditionally available in physical box sets, but the digital film bundles exhibit one interesting point of distinction – what Warner Brothers calls “AR [augmented reality] collectible items”, hidden throughout the movie experience.

While watching the film, owners will discover on-screen QR codes that they can scan with their smartphones to unlock virtual collectibles, such as AR models of character Gandalf’s wand. These items are currently walled into the Warner Brothers’ experience, but the company has said it plans to build a marketplace to let people trade their NFT bundles and eventually individual assets.

Limited to 10,999 editions (10,000 issues of the Mystery version ($30) and 999 of the rarer Epic edition ($100), which contains more bonus features), the Web3 collectible movies are available via the WB Movieverse site, where open “coming soon” slots predict future NFT editions from Warner Brothers’ back catalogue.

To make this offering truly enticing to fans (DVD/Blu-ray box sets with essentially the same bonus content currently retail for a fraction of the price of the digital bundles), Warner Brothers will need to look into how it can make its digital collectibles matter beyond its own closed ecosystem – for instance, imagine a Snapchat filter only owners of digital special editions can use, so they can show off their fandom across social media.