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Monolith Productions might’ve been best-known for its 2014 open-world game Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. (WB Games Image)
Monolith Productions, a Kirkland, Wash.-based game development studio behind Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the F.E.A.R. series, and the upcoming Wonder Woman, has been closed down by its parent company.
Bloomberg first reported that Warner Bros. Games pulled the plug on three of its development studios, including Monolith Productions. In addition, WB has canceled development on Monolith’s Wonder Woman.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier previously reported that the failures of Suicide Squad and MultiVersus represented a $300 million loss for WB, which came alongside reports of production troubles on Wonder Woman.
Monolith has more than 130 employees in the Seattle area, according to LinkedIn. GeekWire reached out to WB Games for further comment.
Other companies affected by the closures include Los Angeles’ Player First Games, which recently shuttered its free-to-play platform fighter MultiVersus, and WB’s satellite studio in San Diego.
The studio closures cap off a particularly chaotic period for WB Games, which has had both big highs and shocking lows in the last two years. While it’s released several best-sellers like the latest Mortal Kombat and the 2023 Harry Potter adaptation Hogwarts Legacy, it’s also responsible for last year’s notorious flop Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
WB Games head David Haddad departed the company in January, with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav saying on a financial call that WB’s games department was “substantially underperforming its potential.”
Monolith Productions was founded in 1994 as an independent game developer in Kirkland. It originally made its mark on the hobby with cult-favorite first-person shooters like 1997’s Blood and 2000’s No One Lives Forever.
It was subsequently acquired by Warner Bros. in 2004, shortly after WB hired Monolith’s co-founder Jason Hall to run its then-new gaming division. Monolith would go on to release original horror games such as F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins through WB.
The company’s biggest mainstream hit came in 2014 when WB tapped Monolith to work on a game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. The result, 2014’s Shadow of Mordor, became a best-seller on the strength of what Monolith called the Nemesis System, where any random enemy you faced in-game could gradually be developed into a unique rival. That led to a 2017 sequel, Shadow of War.
Monolith’s Wonder Woman was first announced in 2021. Allegedly, the first version of the game was being built as an open-world adventure that would use similar systems to Shadow of Mordor. Little information was ever made public about the game, but several sources have reported that the original director left the project in 2024, which led to a full reboot.
