Everybody’s Suing Everybody Day continues! Accusing New Line of employing the kind of “Hollywood accounting” practices that could secret billions of dollars of Lord of the Rings revenues in suspicious budget lines like “Hair/Make-up Hobbitscaping Services,” “Elijah Wood Eye-Desparkling Effects,” and “Hide all profits here! Sssssh!,” representatives from J.R.R. Tolkein’s charitable trust and the author’s heirs have filed suit against the studio, looking to be paid their claimed $150 million share of the LOTR bounty: “I think that it’s going to be extremely interesting to see how New Line is going to explain to a jury that these films grossed $6 billion and yet by their calculations the creators’ heirs are not going to get even a single penny.” Given that New Line was rumored to have paid previous profit-seeker Peter Jackson a $40 million settlement to keep their two The Hobbit films on track, Tolkien’s heirs can probably convince the company to comb through their allegedly cooked books to shake loose eight-figures’ worth of make-nice money before things devolve into ugliness. [NY Times]

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