Another New Line Rings Lawsuit

So what is up with the folks at New Line? Are their royalty checkbooks locked away in a drawer and they lost the key? Did a dog eat their spreadsheets? First Peter Jackson has to force them to live up to their DVD royalties agreements, and now relatives representing the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien is claiming that the studio has failed to pay "even one penny of its contractual share of gross receipts," according to BBC News.

Tolkien family members claim in their lawsuit, Christopher Reuel Tolkien v. New Line Cinema Corp., that they're entitled to 7.5 percent of the movies' gross receipts and accuse New Line of breach of contract and fraud among other allegations, according to Bloomberg. Tolkien's estate, HarperCollins publishers, and the Tolkien Trust charity are jointly suing New Line in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The studio has declined comment.

Charging the studio with "unabashed and insatiable greed," the plaintiffs seek more than $150 million in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages and a court order giving the Tolkien estate the right to terminate any rights New Line may have to make films based on other works by the author, including The Hobbit (insert dramatic chord here).

"I think that it's going to be extremely interesting to see how New Line is going to explain to a jury that these films grossed $6 billion and yet by their calculations the creators' heirs are not going to get even a single penny," said Bonnie Eskenazi, the United States lawyer for the trustees, according to the New York Times.

Christopher Reuel Tolkien has edited or completed many volumes of his father's unpublished work, from The Silmarillion (1977) and the engrossing History of Middle-earth series through to last year's The Children of Húrin. The lawsuit is based on a 1969 contract between the trustees, a predecessor to HarperCollins, and United Artists; the rights were inherited by New Line in 1998.

When my bestselling novels become worldwide classics of fantasy literature, remind me not to go to New Line to have them made into multi-billion-dollar films for which they only pay me an up-front of $62,500, okay? Because that would really suck.