February 12, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Media | comments (0) |

And from things that lurk in dark places, to the land of Mordor near Mountain View and shadows over the High Street, to a hole that’s been dug in the ground.

Yesterday, relatives of JRR Tolkien sued Time Warner Inc.’s New Line Cinema for $150 million. The three Lord of the Rings films were an enormous financial success. According to the web site – Box Office, the film Return of the King was the second-most successful film of all time – in terms of box office receipts, worldwide. The other two films that made up the trilogy both fall into the all-time top 12 – with the three of them collectively grossing around $3bn at the cinema.

Add to that DVD and other sources of revenue, it seems that the films’ makers, New Line Cinema, probably brought in around $6bn or so, claim trustees in Tolkien’s estate.

And yet, Steven Maier, the trustees’ lawyer said yesterday, “New Line has not paid the plaintiffs even one penny of its contractual share of gross receipts despite the billions of dollars of gross revenue generated by these wildly successful motion pictures.”

The trustees and book publisher HarperCollins say that they were supposed to have been paid 7.5 per cent of gross receipts, but allege, among other things, that New Line had included profit share paid to Miramax in the production costs.

It’s not the first big legal case relating to this movie franchise. The director of the trilogy, Peter Jackson, sued New Line in 2005.

But, the Jackson–New Line dispute was resolved, and the famous director is due to begin work on the Hobbit in 2010.

As Tolkien once put it: “In a hole in the ground …” – there lived a legal cesspit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a Hollywood hole, and that meant not just the odd, worm – rather a can of worms.“

December 19, 2007 | posted by Michael Baxter in Media | comments (0) |

This is not really a proper business news story, but it is Christmas, so too bad.

If you have taken the trouble to see the film Golden Compass, you may be left wondering what all the fuss was about. Any kind of anti-religious theme was about as subtle as the Bank of England warning of excessive risk taking earlier in the year. Even Alan Greenspan would struggle to make references as oblique as those in the film. And if there was a criticism of the Church, then it was a criticism aimed at the Church of the Middle Ages. It is true that the second and third books in the trilogy take on a more obvious anti-religious theme, but so far, so very innocuous.

In any case, the chances of a second and third film being made seem to be diminishing. The film makers say their decision rests on the success of the first film, and while it is doing well in the UK, in the US it is going down like a bank specialising in subprime mortgages.

It has now had two weekends on general release in the US and, so far, total box office receipts are coming in at an estimated $41 million, according to the box office web site. These sales are dwarfed by Enchanted, released the week before, with twice that number, while both Alvin and the Chipmunks and I Am Legend, which have only been out for one weekend, are already doing better.

Still, for the film company behind the Golden Compass, New Line Cinema Media, hope comes in the form of a little person with big feet. It appears that Peter Jackson has agreed to make the film, “The Hobbit.” So we could say, “In a hole in the ground called box office disaster, there lived a Hobbit.”