One Ring to Sue Them

Yet another party has sued New Line over a cut of the receipts from The Lord of the Rings — heirs of the Tolkien estate and a group of publishers has sued for at least $150 million. According to the New York Times, the suit alleges that

“they have never received a penny from a 39-year-old agreement that they say promises 7.5 percent of the gross revenue from any films based on Tolkien’s famous novels. New Line, whose spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit, is accused, among other things, of defrauding the Tolkiens by improperly deducting more than $100 million per film in payments to the Zaentz company and Miramax from the pool from which the trust and others would be paid.”

Fun times. In a sense, this is just business as usual in the movie industry, but observers have noted that the frenzy surrounding LOTR seems a bit more intense. Maybe that’s because there’s a boat-load of money at stake: the suit says the movies have grossed upwards of $6 billion dollars. Let’s see . . . at $18 million an hour, that’s enough to run the Iraq war for almost two weeks!

This lawsuit creates a real question as to whether the projected two-film Hobbit series will be made . . . the faithful were ecstatic when Peter Jackson settled his lawsuit with New Line, clearing the way for him to produce, if not actually direct, the prequels (Guillermo del Toro is in talks to direct). Now, the latest lawsuits cast the project once more into jeopardy — it is rumored that one of the Tolkiens’ demands is that New Line’s rights to produce movies based on Tolkien stories be made null and void. Further, New Line took a financial beating with the recent failure of The Golden Compass, prompting talks with parent company Time Warner about the studio’s future. Stay tuned, Hobbit-heads.