The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has just settled out of court with New Line Cinema for an undisclosed amount of money. Here's the gist of the background...Back in (I believe) the 1960's, Mr. Tolkien owed quite a bit of back taxes to the government. To pay off his debts, he sold the rights, including film rights to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit". Eventually those rights were passed on to New Line Cinema who with Peter Jackson brought the world the wonderful "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which as we all know garnered many oscars and hundreds of billions of dollars. New Line Cinema is now on the verge of bringing us two more films which will together tell the story of "The Hobbit".
Now, in February of 2008, quite a few years after all this has gone down, and has proven to be quite a cash-cow, J.R.R. Tolkien's two surviving children who are 80 and 84 years old, decided that they are being cheated out of their share of the money that's being made off of the their father's work, regardless of the fact that he "sold" the rights to these works and was fairly compensated for it. The thing I really hate about this is that there was probably very little chance they would have won any settlement in a court trial, after all, Tolkien had sold the rights. They knew though that since New Line Cinema was going into pre-production on "The Hobbit", that any court action would snarl up the shooting of the upcoming movies and cost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars even if they won. So it was just a ploy to get them to settle out of court for enough money to make the old greedy bastards happy!
It's a shame that the U.S. court system is basically just used by most people these days to "blackmail" people and corporations out of money simply through the threat of a protracted court case. Shame on the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, if the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy of movies had been a flop, they'd have never even considered trying to sue for a share of any of it's money.
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