Peter Jackson's film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy raked in more than $6 billion worldwide. His forthcoming Hobbit films, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, could pull in billions more.
So where's Tolkien's cut?
That's what the famed author's estate wants to find out in court. Settlement talks with Time Warner, which incorporated the New Line Cinema unit that made the Lord of the Rings movies earlier this decade, have crumbled. The fate of The Hobbit hangs in the balance.
"Should this case go all the way through trial, we are confident that New Line will lose its right to release The Hobbit," attorney Bonnie Eskenazi told Bloomberg. Eskenazi's firm, Greenberg Glusker, is representing Tolkien's heirs in Christopher Reuel Tolkien v. New Line Cinema Corp. this October in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Tolkien's heirs are asking for $220 million. That's not exactly chump change, but it isn't extortion either. The fact that they haven't been paid anything yet, other than the $250,000 Tolkien received in 1969 for signing over his film rights to United Artists, says more about the entertainment industry's creative accounting than it does about the films themselves, which were world-beating successes that leaned very heavily on Tolkien's densely layered mythos. Without it, the films were, quite literally, nothing.
Tolkien's original contract with United Artists gives the author's estate the power to terminate further rights to his work. That includes The Hobbit films, which, at last report, have moved into the screenplay phase, with production scheduled to commence in 2010 in Jackson's native New Zealand. Time Warner is asking Judge Ann I. Jones to reject that termination power.
Tolkien fandom should strap in for a bumpy, ugly ride. Who knows? It could give birth to some beautiful movies. Or it could fulfill that fearsome Middle-Earth spell: One ring to bring them all/And in the darkness bind them.
Image courtesy Allen and Unwin/Wikipedia
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