Tolkien Trilogy Has Given New Line Boost Inside AOL

"THE LORD OF THE RINGS" is the story of a Hobbit named Frodo Baggins who sets out on a quest to destroy a magical ring with evil powers. But the movie version has achieved an equally formidable goal: elevating the status of New Line Cinema Corp. inside corporate parent AOL Time Warner Inc.

When New Line was still making "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy with its $310 million budget, Hollywood insiders joked that the movies would become the most expensive made-for-cable miniseries ever on TNT, the AOL-owned cable channel where, the joke went, the sequels would be dumped if the first one failed. Turning the 54-year-old tales of Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien into a Cecil B. De Mille-style epic seemed particularly risky at a time when audiences were flocking to see movies featuring pop-culture icons like "Spider-Man" and "X-Men," and Harry Potter appeared to have a lock on the fantasy-film category for years to come.

Moreover, New Line was committed to making all three "Lord of the Rings" movies simultaneously, and it had entrusted the whole shebang to Peter Jackson, an obscure New Zealand director who boasted that he had hardly ever set foot in Hollywood. "It wasn't just a departure for us," says Michael Lynne, co-chairman of New Line. "It was a departure for anybody."

But as New Line prepares for the release of "The Two Towers," its second "Rings" film, the landscape has changed. The first installment, "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," which came out in December 2001, sold $860 million in tickets, the fifth-highest global box-office sales ever. New Line already has shipped a total of 35 million "Fellowship" DVDs and videotapes, and it expects to sell more than 18 million in the U.S. alone by the end of the holidays.

With nearly two weeks left before the Dec. 18 opening of "Two Towers," audience "tracking" data circulated to Hollywood studios show very high interest. In fact, the positive buzz for the second "Rings" movie exceeds the buzz for the second Harry Potter. Nearly double the percentage of potential moviegoers identify "Two Towers" as their first choice of a movie to see, compared with those who picked "Chamber of Secrets" 12 days before that movie opened.

In addition, Fandango, an online ticketing service that represents about 20% of the country's movie screens, says advance ticket sales for "Two Towers" are running higher than those for any other movie in the service's history, including "Chamber of Secrets."

All in all, the "Rings" juggernaut is a striking turnaround for New Line, which just two years ago was on tenterhooks with its corporate bosses after a series of missteps. With the exception of popular sequels such as "Austin Powers in Goldmember," "Blade 2" and "Rush Hour 2," most of the studio's movies besides "Lord of the Rings" have performed only so-so at the box office. But "Lord of the Rings" has "changed perception both inside and out" of the company, says Richard Parsons, chief executive of AOL Time Warner. He adds that the movie recast New Line's image from "just another studio" to one of "superstar status."

New Line has always been an anomaly in formulaic Hollywood. Started 35 years ago by attorney and film buff Robert Shaye to distribute "Reefer Madness" to college campuses, New Line built its early reputation as a purveyor of imports and exploitation movies such as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The studio later created the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" series. Then in the 1990s it started producing higher quality pictures such as Robert Altman's "The Player" and "Short Cuts." Sold to Turner Broadcasting in 1994 and then absorbed in Turner's merger with Time Warner, New Line in recent years has focused on midsize budget movies with fast-rising talent including Chris Tucker, Mike Myers, Ice Cube and Adam Sandler.

Then New Line fumbled. The studio had megabombs with Mr. Sandler's "Little Nicky" and "Town and Country" with Warren Beatty. Those setbacks came not long after then-parent Time Warner almost sold the studio, but "because we had an off year they couldn't get that great a number" from interested parties, says Mr. Shaye. And Ted Turner fought the sale, arguing that a second source to supply the company's cable channels with movies was more valuable then a one-time gain.

So by last year New Line still needed to show that its big-budget "Lord of the Rings" project could perform as well as the studio claimed. Now, 12 months later and approaching $1.3 billion in retail ticket and video sales, "there has been an acknowledgment of the franchise," says Ken Kamins, an agent at International Creative Management who represents "Rings" director Jackson. "They don't have much explaining to do this year."

This time out, "Lord of the Rings" isn't suffering from second banana status inside AOL Time Warner. The company's premier outlets are seeking to share the movie with their audiences. The trailer for the sequel premiered on AOL before it appeared on the movie's own Web site.

AOL Time Warner's WB network, which attracts young female viewers, is broadcasting a one-hour special about the movie. (Last year, rival network Fox, which caters more to men, carried the special.) And sister cable network TNT will rerun the special at 11 p.m. on Wednesday -- one hour before tickets go on sale for midnight showings.

The first time around, "Lord of the Rings" had to make do with an inside story in Newsweek. This year it got a cover story in AOL Time Warner-owned Time magazine, which trumpeted that "Two Towers" is "even better than" "Fellowship of the Ring." Jim Kelly, managing editor of Time, says he made "Two Towers" the traditional fourth-quarter movie cover story because "it would play better" among readers. It just happened to be from a sister company, he adds. "I would have fought hard for this movie if it had been made by Miramax."

Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing at New Line, says that cross-promotional moves aren't mandated at the corporate level but are the result of individual negotiations with each of the parties. "They are just latching on to something that has been successful," he says.

But New Line executives scoff at the idea that they may try to capitalize on the success of "Lord of the Rings" by producing a "prequel" based on Mr. Tolkien's first book, "The Hobbit," which introduces Middle Earth.

Instead, the studio is developing another possible trilogy drawn from children's novelist Philip Pullman's fantasy series, "His Dark Materials," which includes "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass." This time, a precocious 11-year-old orphan girl raised by Oxford scholars is the heroine. Playwright Tom Stoppard is writing the screenplay for the first movie. New Line says it could be ready for release in 2005.

New Line Cinema hopes to repeat box-office success with `The Two Towers,' the second installment of its `Lord of the Rings' trilogy.

I posted this on your other new thread, and it was intended for this thread! (crossed-threaded it!)

Anyhow:

I saw Peter Jackson interviewed on Today Show last week. Matt (what's his name) said something funny. He said, I am here with Peter Jackson, who was introduced last year as "The man who will kill New Line Cinema if this movie sucks".

LOL! - He said the pressure for box office success was less this time around, but not his pressure to make a good film.

The last part of this mentions that they are working on Pullman's fantasies next. This is very bad news. Phillip Pullman's fantasies are overtly anti Christian.

Harry Potter is minimally moral, with a gnostic philosophy behind it. Some Christians object to them due to the blurring of wiccan ideas as reality rather than fantasy, but do agree the good guy wins in the end.

Tolkein's work has a Catholic christian moral point of view, influenced by medieval Catholicism and pre christian nordic ethics.

Idiots! If done to the same quality level as LOTR , The Hobbit couldn't fail to be a big success -- and much of the design work and props from the "Weta Workshop" are already done...

In fact, I consider The Hobbit to be an essential part of LOTR.

I take all four books with me on vacation every year; and (beginning with The Hobbit, of course), read them straight through -- while lying in the shade when it's too hot to fish... (With Karen Wynn Fonstadt's The Atlas of Middle Earth always close at hand, of course...)

FYI, & IMHO, the New Line Platinum Series four-CD Special Extended DVD Edition of The Fellowship of The Ring is well worth having. There are some eight hours of appendices covering the design and making of the movie -- that add tremendously to your understanding and appreciation of the movie itself. (Each 'race' has its own distinct architectural, clothing, weapons, etc. design theme, for instance.)

Can you imagine what a treasure a full DVD set of the four movies with complete DVD appendices would be!?!

I can hardly wait for the next two installments!

I agree. I don't see how they would NOT want to do The Hobbit, especially if they were to sign Jackson on to do it (which I would bet he would like to do also).

Perhaps there is another reason they are not looking to film The Hobbit. Maybe the Tolkien estate isn't willing to sell the rights to make it a film, or at least not at the price they are being offered.

Considering how well LOTR has done with just the one movie, it would be wise for the Tolkien estate to hold out for more compensation.

Hollywood insiders joked that the movies would become the most expensive made-for-cable miniseries ever on TNT, the AOL-owned cable channel where, the joke went, the sequels would be dumped if the first one failed.

Naturally the Hollywood elitist didn’t believe that a major motion picture could be made by an outsider and be successful (despite the fact that anything truly new can only be made by Hollywood outsiders).

Also leave it to these elitist to underestimate the depth of the movie going public. These people believe that only teenagers and children go to the movies and so only write scripts to that age level.

By the way The Hobbit may have passed out of copy right. I believe it was written in the late forties, it may have passed out of copy right before the laws were changed in the eighties (I think).

I'm very sorry to hear they are doing the Pullman trilogy. It's absolutely poisonous. No one should let their children get anywhere near the books.

My wife didn't believe me until she read the first book. It pulls you into the story, is regretably well written and well advertised--and then it does a real job of subtly turning every moral and religious principle upside down. By the end of the third novel it emerges that God is a tyrant, and the hero and heroine kill Him off and live happily ever after.

With Tom Stoppard on board it may do very well. But I urge people to stay away from it. In fact, I feel a little bad about giving a sleazy outfit like AOL Time Warner any money at all, but LOTR is just too good to miss.

Phillip Pullman's fantasies are overtly anti Christian.

I've read two of his trilogies. In each, the first two books are fine, but the third might as well be New York Times editorials. No subtlety at all. Pullman is a good, engaging writer, but it's obvious that he has real animosity towards Christianity and capitalism.

I'm not a book-banning type, and there are very few books I'd say this about. My children and grandchildren read Harry Potter, for instance, and I have no problems with it. We read pretty near everything. But the Pullman books are, IMHO, deliberately malicious. If you want your kids to read it, I'd suggest you look at it first. The reviewer have really pushed it hard, and the covers are attractive, so a lot of people have been fooled.

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	Fellowship of the Ring	The Two Towers
Production cost	$100 million	$110 million
Marketing cost	$60 million	$45 to $50M
Promotional partner	Burger King	Verizon Wireless
Domestic ticket sales	$313 million	Opens Dec. 18
Intl ticket sales	$547 million
Total ticket sales	$860 million
Domestic DVD and VHS units shipped	20 million
Intl DVD and VHS units shipped	15 million