The Lord of the Rings lawsuit is back in the news again, but it isn’t between New Line Cinema and director Peter Jackson. This time producer Saul Zaentz, age 86, (pictured here) is taking the production distributor to task and filed suit against them for not disclosing its accounting of the multi-billion dollar Ring frachise.
Zaentz’s lawyers filed the suit on Thursday in the Los Angeles courts. It was Zaentz who got the rights to film J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and who pushed to get Peter Jackson to helm all three films.
Jackson was scheduled to also direct the prequel, “The Hobbit,” but after he filed his lawsuit, New Line Cinema began to actively search for a new director for the project. After several attempts that failed, New Line Cinema has been playing nice, sort of, and wants Jackson back in the center seat. Whether Jackson will return to direct “The Hobbit” is still up in the air at this time.
The Zaentz suit claims the his license specifies that he should have received a share of the adjusted gross receipts from all three films. That total would amount to more than $3 billion, which he alleges he has yet to receive.
The lawsuit said New Line breached its contract by refusing to cooperate with an audit by Zaentz’s company, and asks a judge to force New Line to cooperate with the audit and to pay damages, according to a report from the Reuters New Service.
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