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Family behind The Lord Of The Rings raises £10 million in dividend, documents show
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Power: Morfydd Clark in the TV version of The Lord Of The Rings
The family behind The Lord Of The Rings has raised £10 million in dividends, documents show.
The record payout by the Tolkien Estate is more than double last year’s and comes to the fore when a big budget version of the fantasy novels hits TV. It brings the total amount paid out to over £50 million over the past decade.
Most of the intellectual property rights were sold to Hollywood producer Saul Zaentz in the 1970s, meaning author JRR Tolkien’s heirs largely missed out on the huge sums generated by the wildly successful Peter Jackson film trilogy.
The estate primarily controls publishing rights, and book sales have skyrocketed with over 150 million copies of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy sold. But the Zaentz deal didn’t cover TV rights. So the new series, The Rings Of Power, was negotiated with the estate.
Amazon’s production budget is estimated at $1 billion (£900 million). The latest bills don’t seem to show the financial fruits of the agreement yet.
Bills for the estate have been filed amid uncertainty as to who inherited some of the family’s stock. Priscilla Tolkien, the author’s youngest child, who had no children, died earlier this year. The academic fiercely guarded her father’s legacy before her death at the age of 92.