SO "THE LORD OF THE RINGS" made no money.
Let me amend that. The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.
Tolkien obviously isn't Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred in it, or New Line Cinema, the studio that financed it, or Miramax, which owned the film rights for a second but couldn't get the movie made, or producer Saul Zaentz, who bought the rights in 1976. He's just the guy who dreamed up the cosmology, the whole shebang of hobbits and dwarfs, orcs, ents, wargs, trolls, whatnot. "Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne." Those were old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's words.
But he's dead, so why should Hollywood share any of the dough?
I wondered if that's what the Time Warner empire must be thinking when I waded through the lawsuit filed against New Line in February by Tolkien's children on behalf of two Tolkien trusts. There are only two Tolkien children still living -- Christopher, age 83, and Priscilla, age 79 -- and the case is not scheduled to be heard until October 2009. Days after the filing, New Line folded and became a division of Warner Bros. -- some might call that karma.
Maybe I'm naive, but I find it hard to believe that not a sliver of gold could be found in all of Middle-earth for not only the aged Tolkiens but also the charitable trust that gets 50% of their fortune and distributes money to such causes as Save the Children, the Darfur Appeal, the National Campaign for Homeless People and UNICEF.
According to their lawsuit and lawyer Bonnie Eskenazi, Tolkien licensed motion picture rights to United Artists back in 1969 for a low six-figure sum and 7.5% of the "gross receipts." Gross receipts are the money the distributor actually gets from the theaters and ancillary markets. (In the case of theatrical income, it's usually about 50% of the box-office take.) "This is a deal under which we get a percentage of the gross once an artificial break-even is reached. The artificial break-even is essentially 2.6 times the negative cost of the film," says Eskenazi.
