I was thinking some more about the new game “Shadow of Mordor” (read the review by Carolyn Petit here). I can’t really add anything to her review — she makes it sound like the plot of God of War was transplanted into an Assassin’s Creed game set among some of Tolkien’s ideas — not truly in the Tolkien universe.
I wanted to criticize Christopher Tolkien and the literary estate for allowing this to happen, but then I read this article about the Tolkien Estate’s battles with Warner over digital content, and I saw that the Estate had accepted a percentage of the net film proceeds — which is incredible to me. Everybody knows that films don’t make money on net, and if you want to get paid you need a piece of the gross. This is not news.
So I started thinking about CT’s age; he sounds pretty sharp in the interview, but the guy was born in 1924, and he licensed the films in something like 2004, so he was 80 then and he’s 90 now. So I’m now I’m just feeling down about the whole thing.
I bet when CT dies, Warner will execute their option to dig up the remains of JRR Tolkien, hang him, and then burn him, like the royalists did with Oliver Cromwell.
My understanding has been that the terms of the deal are left over from J.R.R. Tolkien’s original sale of film rights in 1969, not anything that Christopher Tolkien has done. I don’t think Hollywood accounting was as widely publicized then, perhaps especially in Britain.
(From what I’ve heard, Christopher Tolkien and the Estate would have blocked every one of Jackson’s films if they’d had any leverage at all to do so. But “Tolkien Enterprises” had no such motivation. This is, however, why we’re very unlikely to see any film based on Silmarillion material until the copyright expires.)
Fair enough – I only learned about it as a consequence of Buchwald v. Paramount (1988). And it’s possibly that this particular accounting method wasn’t standardized until later, so conceivably it wasn’t even a bad deal back in 1969.
Great, thanks for sharing this article. Really Cool. gfegafefbffkggce