What the hell? I’m beginning to wonder if New Line is run by crooks. First Peter Jackson teed them up for swindling him. Their response was something like “Well Peter made a lot of money so it’s okay if we steal from him.”
And now:
Fifteen Kiwi actors who appeared in various installments of “Lord of the Rings” got a lesson in Hollywood accounting when they opened royalty statements from New Line and found that despite millions of dollars in sales of lunchboxes, T-shirts, caps and other LOTR gimcrack, there was — gasp! — zero “net merchandising revenue.”
So typical. These studios never release accurate budgets, DVD sales, or merchandising figures. The only reason they release box office numbers is so they can boast their film finished #1. If any other business in the world was run like this they’d be mercilessly held up to ridicule. If say Brad told me he lost a few of my reviews so sorry for no paycheck this month, and I couldn’t prove I wrote them anyway I would have him beaten up. And yet, somehow, when it comes to studios they don’t have to honor contracts or open their books up.
Now, this lawsuit is a somewhat technical one, because it’s based on percentages and different accounting methods but here’s an example of the issue at hand:
The biggest of these was a 50% distribution fee that the actors had never seen mentioned anywhere in their contract, according to the lawsuit.
So here is what probably happened. The studio made X amount of dollars off of merchandise. They then subtracted every expense ever, including the secretaries and lines of blow for the Hollywood parties and said “viola, we didn’t make any money off of merchandising.” It took years, but someone’s agent finally said “Hey, wait a sec here..”
The L.O.T.R. franchise has made many billions of dollars. Probably upwards of five billion if you count DVDs and merchandise. New Line banked off of it. And yet, they have been complete jerk-offs about the whole thing. They probably could have settled this for half of what they owed. And now? Off we go to court. I hope they lose everything, including the rights to The Hobbitt. That would be Karmic justice.
