Chapter 456: CH : 445 Shortchanging Everyone

We require only 58 additional Power Stone donors, only 7 more reviews, and 900 more collections and newly added Discord 47 more members to unlock the next bonus Chapters.

Get those stones going boys and tomboys, we need to get those numbers up!

Join my Patreon

GodofPleasure

(dot)com/GodofPleasure

****

The question was how much Warner could reasonably get in exchange for becoming part of the production without touching the underlying copyright or production.

That was where the negotiation would begin.

And Warner had plenty to ask for.

A project of this size could generate an extraordinary amount of business beyond the production itself—domestic theatrical distribution, international distribution, marketing, home video, merchandising, and eventually television and licensing.

A franchise that, if successful, could continue generating revenue long after the films left theaters.

Nobody needed to say the word franchise. It was already sitting in the room with them.

But there was no reason to start carving up the pie before they knew exactly what Marvin was prepared to offer.

And Alan, in particular, had no interest in treating this as a one-off transaction.

He was looking beyond the three films.

Marvin was young, but he was already bringing serious capital into Hollywood and building a studio of his own. If the relationship worked, there would be other pictures after this one.

Other opportunities. Other deals.

Horn wanted those too.

That didn’t mean Warner was going to negotiate out of kindness.

Business was business.

They would push.

They would test every part of the proposal and see where Marvin’s limits were.

If Marvin was prepared to surrender ten points, Horn would ask whether he would surrender fifteen.

If Marvin offered Warner a distribution fee, they would see whether they could improve it. If Marvin offered theatrical rights, they would ask about home video. If he offered domestic distribution, they’d ask about international.

They would negotiate every piece they could reasonably justify.

If there was room to improve Warner’s economics, they would try.

But they weren’t going to gut the relationship simply to squeeze another few points out of one deal.

Horn wasn’t interested in winning one negotiation only to lose the relationship afterward.

For now, however, none of that needed to be settled.

Peter was still presenting.

He changed the slide.

A massive battle formation filled the screen. "This," he said, pointing toward the image, "is where the scale becomes important."

The room became quiet again.

Marvin leaned forward.

They had reached the part where the conversation could finally move beyond the story itself.

The question was no longer whether Warner Bros. wanted *The Lord of the Rings*.

They did.

Now they had to figure out what it would cost to get inside the tent without Marvin giving them the keys.

---

June 27, 1999.

Hollywood woke up to news nobody had expected to see that summer.

*The Lord of the Rings* was finally going to the screen.

Not as one film. As a trilogy.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s sprawling fantasy, the book that had spent decades being called too difficult, too expensive and too risky to adapt faithfully, was officially moving forward as a series of live-action feature films.

And the name behind it was even more surprising.

Meyers Studios.

The barely established company founded by Hollywood’s teenage prodigy had emerged as the project’s primary investor and creative force. But Marvin Meyers wasn’t alone in it. New Line Cinema, operating under the Time Warner umbrella, had come aboard as a major production and distribution partner.

Then came the number that made the announcement impossible to ignore.

$300 million. That was the approved production budget for the trilogy.

Three films. Three years of production. Three hundred million dollars.

For Hollywood, it was an almost absurd amount of money to put behind a fantasy series that had never been successfully brought to the screen on anything close to this scale.

By the end of the morning, every major trade had the story.

And suddenly, everyone in the industry had the same question.

What the hell was Marvin Meyers planning to make?

In the late nineties, spending $300 million on a fantasy trilogy directed by a filmmaker best known for splatter horror looked less like a bold investment and more like corporate suicide.

Marvin saw it differently.

Money couldn’t make a great film by itself. But being afraid to spend it could make a great film smaller than it needed to be.

Peter Jackson had the vision. What he needed was room to execute it.

The $300 million coming from Meyers Pictures covered the production of all three films, deliberately giving Jackson considerably more resources than the project had possessed in Marvin’s previous timeline. New Line wouldn’t have to squeeze every department just to keep the schedule alive, and Jackson wouldn’t have to choose between what he wanted on screen and what the budget could survive.

Additionally Marvin had no interest in wasting that advantage on celebrity salaries.

There would be no parade of $20-million stars brought together simply because their names looked impressive on a poster. Marvin wanted the money on the screen, not buried in inflated star salaries. He was even prepared to push the original cast toward leaner compensation wherever he could, squeezing as much value as possible from every dollar without compromising the performances that made the films work.

*The Lord of the Rings* was an ensemble. The story itself was the attraction, and the actors would be paid accordingly. The money saved could go somewhere Marvin considered far more important.

Onto the screen.

He wanted Weta Workshop and Weta Digital properly funded from the beginning. Not just enough money to get the films finished, but enough to build the physical and digital infrastructure required to make Middle-earth feel as though it actually existed.

Sets were one of his first priorities.

Rivendell would be built with enough detail that the camera could move through it instead of constantly hiding behind carefully chosen angles. Helm’s Deep would be a substantial physical environment rather than a few walls surrounded by digital extensions. Isengard, Minas Morgul and, above all, Minas Tirith would receive the same treatment.

Wherever practical construction made sense, Marvin wanted it built.

Where a miniature could do the job better than a digital environment, they would build the miniature.

Weta’s model makers would have the time and materials to create enormous landscapes, fortifications, ships, towers and battlefield environments, photographed with sophisticated motion-control systems rather than treated as disposable background pieces.

The battles would receive the same philosophy.

More horses. More cavalry. More armor. More weapons. More stunt performers and extras. More practical destruction.

Marvin didn’t want a few hundred people photographed from different angles and multiplied until they looked like an army. Digital crowd systems could extend what was photographed, but the foundation needed to be real. When thousands of soldiers charged across a field, the audience should feel the weight of an army moving, not simply recognize a clever visual effect.

The same applied to the creatures.

Practical prosthetics, animatronics and physical effects would work alongside digital effects rather than being discarded in favor of making everything inside a computer. Weta Digital and Creature Effects, would have the time to develop believable creatures, environments and autonomous battlefield agents, while the production itself would provide enough photographed material to keep the digital work grounded.

And there would be time. That mattered almost as much as the money.

Additional shooting days would give Jackson room to discover that a scene wasn’t working and fix it. Pickups wouldn’t automatically become a budget crisis. Battle sequences could be refined instead of hurried because the production calendar was collapsing around them.

Marvin wanted extensive location photography across New Zealand, too. Middle-earth needed to have a physical geography. The mountains, forests, plains and valleys couldn’t feel like scenery pasted behind actors. Decades later, when someone restored the films or examined their original photography, those landscapes needed to remain convincing.

The same attention went into costumes and armor.

There would be multiple versions of important pieces: functional armor for stunt work, lighter versions where necessary, hero pieces for close-ups and enough duplicates for background performers. Swords would actually have weight. Shields would actually look used. Armor would show wear instead of appearing as though it had been taken out of a packaging box that morning.

Even the finishing process received money.

Better film scanning. Better compositing. Better preservation of visual-effects elements. Careful archival storage of original negatives, masters, miniatures, artwork, costumes, props and production documentation.

Marvin wasn’t thinking only about opening weekend.

He was thinking about whether the films would still look extraordinary fifty or a hundred years later.

That was the part nobody in Hollywood quite understood about him.

He wasn’t trying to buy prestige. He was trying to remove compromises.

Every dollar saved from an unnecessary star salary could become another shooting day. Another miniature. Another camera rig. Another costume. Another horse. Another practical set. Another month for Weta’s artists to solve a creature that didn’t look right.

Money, in Marvin’s mind, was supposed to buy time and options.

And after everything he had seen in another life, he was almost fanatical about it.

He knew exactly what Middle-earth could become when filmmakers were given the resources to realize it properly. He also knew every place where the production in his old timeline had been forced to settle, improvise or move on because there simply wasn’t enough money or time to do anything else.

Those compromises had produced masterpieces.

Marvin intended to erase as many of them as humanly possible. Anything less would feel like a disgrace.

Not merely to the films.

The very fact that he was a demon transmigrator meant anything he touched carried a certain standard with it. To do something half-heartedly would feel like a disgrace—not only to Mother Abyss, but to the fellow transmigrators who had come before and after him. He would take that failure personally. Perfection was always his first instinct; whenever he set his mind to something, his immediate goal was to refine it, strengthen it, and push it as close to perfection as he possibly could.

And *the Lord of the Rings* project was certainly no exception. If Marvin was going to put his name, his money, and his reputation behind a trilogy of this magnitude, then every piece of the undertaking had to be built with the same attention to detail.

The films themselves were only one part of the equation.

Getting a production of this size made required another one behind the scenes: the financing, distribution, corporate structure and contractual protections had to be built almost as carefully as Middle-earth itself.

The deal had taken only a few hours to hammer out with the top dogs Marvin and Alan sitting together.

Warner Bros. had brought its production executives, distribution people and business-affairs lawyers to the table. Meyers Studios had brought a legal team that had earned a reputation for being almost impossible to move once Marvin had decided where the line was.

They argued over everything. Who put up the money. Who controlled the production. Who carried which risks. Who got paid first. Who could approve what. And, most importantly, who owned what when the films were finished.

The final structure was complicated enough that very few people outside the negotiations would ever understand all of it.

At the center was the $300 million production commitment. Meyers Studios would provide the entire production budget in hard capital.

That meant the money actually going onto the negative: physical production, sets, locations, costumes, equipment, visual effects, post-production, music recording and the enormous number of other expenses required to make three films of this scale. Marvin’s contracted compensation as an actor and assistant producer, Co-writer along with the cost of the orchestral score, soundtrack fees, physical and digital effects work, would be accounted for within the overall production financing structure rather than treated as money coming from New Line.

Meyers was therefore carrying the principal production risk.

If the films went over budget, Marvin’s company was the first party exposed to the production-side consequences.

If the trilogy became a phenomenon, however, Meyers would also have the largest economic participation.

The negotiated recoupment structure gave Meyers Studios a dominant 68 percent participation in the defined theatrical proceeds after the agreed distribution and contractual deductions.

New Line Cinema was taking a very different position.

It wouldn’t put a dollar into the $300 million production budget.

Instead, New Line would use what it already had: a functioning worldwide theatrical distribution operation, relationships with exhibitors, marketing infrastructure, publicity departments, international offices and the machinery required to get three enormous pictures from finished negatives into theaters around the world.

That wasn’t cheap.

New Line’s projected commitment to prints and advertising, publicity and distribution expenses across the trilogy was expected to fall somewhere around $75 million to $110 million, depending on the eventual campaign for each picture. In practical terms, that meant roughly $34 million to $36 million per film, with the final expenditure determined by the release strategy and market conditions.

****

Join my Discord...

(Discord dot gg slash 2MfM9J7dBj)

Join my Patreon

GodofPleasure

(dot)com slash GodofPleasure