http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=2001752%2C5
New Line Cinema Fires Everyone, Nearly
By Josh Tyler: 2008-04-15 03:51:48
New Line Cinema Fires Everyone, Nearly Back in early March when we first heard that New Line Cinema would be absorbed into Time Warner, industry sources predicted that in the process nearly 75% of their staff would be laid off as part of the reshuffling. Those estimates were a little low.
This morning Variety is reporting that they’re firing… well… just about everyone. 450 employees are being kicked out the door, leaving only 40 or 50 behind to mind the store, or whatever’s left of it. Additionally, another 40 will be offered jobs inside Time Warner, which I guess means New Line Cinema pretty much no longer exists. Does it?
That’s where I start getting a little bit confused. In February Time Warner announced that a scaled down version of New Line would continue to exist, managing its own development, production, marketing, and publicity, though in a much more scaled down manner. But it’s hard to imagine them accomplishing much with no one left to answer the phone, let alone make an actual movie.
Hopefully, New Line sticks around, if only as a shell brand whose logo Time Warner slaps on the front of certain movies. Maybe they’ve fallen on hard times since Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit just won’t seem quite right without a New Line Cinema logo in front of it. I’d miss that musical little filmstrip.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15609
New Line Cinema — RIP
p2pnet news | Movies:- It’s pink-slip time at ‘former mini-major’ studio New Line Cinema of Lord of the Rings fame.
Some 450 employees in New York and Los Angeles are to be fired, leaving only about 40-50 “staffers” to keep the company, “retooled as a genre-oriented label within Warner Bros. as part of a Time Warner cost-cutting effort,” afloat, says the Hollywood Reporter, going on:
“Another 40 New Line employees are being offered positions elsewhere within Warner Bros.”
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced in February the company was, “folding New Line into Warner Bros. as part of a move designed to save $50 million annually, with New Line to make six to eight pics per year,” says Variety.
Cumulative worldwide gross receipts of the LoR trilogy amounted to nearly $6 billion, said the JRR Tolkien estate, suing the studio.
The “revamped” New Line will have a small development and production team along with marketing, publicity and business affairs execs, says the Hollywood Reporter
And No, its owner, Time Warner, the isn’t blaming file sharers.
Yet.
Last year, 15 actors from the LoR trilogy are sued New Line for breach of contract, claiming they were still owed a percentage of the estimated $100 million US in profits from sales of movie merchandise, said the Associated Press at the time, going on:
“The New Zealand actors were supposed to split five per cent of the revenue after expenses from sales of caps, video games, mugs and other merchandise, says the lawsuit filed May 30 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The suit contends New Line breached the contract by taking distribution and gross participation fees to which it wasn’t entitled.”
The fees weren’t in the contract and, “ate up all the profits owed to the actors, their lawyer, Henry Gradstein, was quoted as saying, adding:
“The expenses will always be approximately 104 per cent. It’s Hollywood accounting.”
Trustees of the Tolkien Trust, a British charity, also sued New Line, “for its failure to pay a contractually required gross profit participation in the three films based on the world-famous Lord of the Rings trilogy”.
JRR T olkien estate trustees and HarperCollins Publishers are co-plaintiffs, said a statement, going on:
“The Lord of the Rings films produced by New Line are among the most financially successful films ever created by Hollywood and were released in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively.”
Notwithstanding the, “overwhelming financial success of the films, and the fact that the plaintiffs have a gross participation in each of the films, New Line has failed to pay the plaintiffs any portion of the gross profit participation at all,” said the estate.
Economic “downturn” anyone?