In one of those revelations that cause double-takes, it was revealed that to date New Line Cinema has paid $62,500 for the rights to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Steven Maier, a lawyer for the UK-based Tolkien Trust, said, "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 suit seeks to block New Line's use of The Hobbit for two upcoming pictures, which, given the profits realized on the first three films, may be a major incentive to ante up.
On the left coast, Bonnie Eskenazi, the trustees’ US counsel who filed the complaint in L. A., said: "New Line has brought new meaning to the phrase 'creative accounting.' I cannot imagine how on earth New Line will argue to a jury that these films could gross literally billions of dollars and yet the creator’s heirs, who are entitled to a share of gross receipts, don’t get a penny." If things go as they did in the Peter Jackson case, the matter will probably be settled out out of court, depriving the public of the chance to admire the work of New Line's accounting department.