Lawsuits to rule them all, lawsuits to find them…

…Lawsuits to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

They’re preciousss, those nasty little hobbitses. We loves them, we does; oh yes. But not quite as much, perhaps, as the lawyers do.

The three Lord of the Rings films have taken just under $3 billion at the box office since 2001, and who knows how much more via home-entertainment platforms. Part one of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, has taken a shade more than $1 billion. The various merchandising spinoffs – a veritable storming horde of products including action figures, Lego sets, costumes and role-playing games – has generated untold millions more.

Little wonder this precious bounty has given birth to a whole other sub-industry – hotly contested court cases to determine the ownership and right to profit from all things hobbit-related. For those involved, the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien has become the one ring that binds them all … in endless litigation.

Fortunately, none of this particularly shows up in real life, although the pub (called the Hobbit) that got mentioned later on in the article should be left the heck alone.  Anyway, read the whole thing if you want to tsk-tsk various people who you probably would be predisposed to like, if only they would stop obsessing over the ‘billion’ bit*.

Moe Lane

*Although I will readily admit that I might be a little less dismissive of the way these people are being poor sports about it all if there was any conceivable way that I could get my hands on a good chunk of that four billion and counting.  I am not a Buddha.