If you see a trademark registered 'at random', sometimes the reason is entirely defensive.
Or namely, they're doing it to defend their IP, even if they have no plans to do anything with it in the future.
The best way to see a trademark registration is this: You file with the country/region the trademarks necessary to launch the IP, but it is an OPTION.
Namely, you don't have to. (IP law is pretty complicated, but it amounts to 'You can trademark just about anything that isn't considered public domain, as long as no one else can prove prior art to the date of your application.')
You technically don't even have to register the trademark at all, but it saves a lot of legal headache if you do.
Sometimes of course, you trademark with the intention of making sure no one can make anything that could be considered 'conflicting' with your work or could be seen as 'unfairly similar' to your work and thus can be seen as an 'infringement' usually via 'conflation'.
Or basically, you register because you may not have any intention of releasing, but you don't want ANYONE ELSE to release something with a similar sounding name, image, or concept.
I put the quotes for a reason - what the law says is considered those terms can get pretty silly - Apple (The computer company) tried to sue Woolworths (the biggest of the supermarkets in Australia) over the fact that Woolworths had an apple shape in its trademark, and argued that the apple in it was unfairly conflating the two brands together. (Even though of course, Apple and Woolworths aren't anywhere NEAR each other market wise.)
It took the ACCC (An Australian Government branch) to tell Apple to quit it, for being, well, a bunch of morons, if for no other reason, Woolworths had the trademark registered for about 20 years, and it wasn't going to win, and if the courts somehow ruled in favour of Apple, they'd get right on changing the rules in Australia to prevent that sort of stupid from lasting more than a week.
It's not the worst of it though - intel previously wanted the letter 'i' as a trademark and spent years suing people for it (including apple, as you can guess), and unknown to most of the anime fanbase because three people (I was one of them) killed the story before it went to ANN) the word cosplay was at threat of being trademarked in the US via the Bourne Convention, via Singapore.
That option expired in 2007, but I think we should be thankful that there's a limitation to how long you can wait before you can request an automatic granting via a trademark export, and the fact that, of course, the people who did register it (check Sinagpore's trademark registry if you doubt the story) never clued into the convention that permitted the export to Japan and the US with no contest.
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The long and short of it is? A trademark implies either a defensive option to prevent similar IPs from using anything similar, or an intention to actually use the IP.
Don't count on a release until you get news that confirms that, well, someone's going to do something OTHER than file the trademark application in a drawer.
