As I anticipated, during my three-week absence in Egypt, a major development took place in the saga of attempts to get the two Hobbit films underway. Better late than never, though, and anyway, no one in the media seems to have noticed this development. No, I’m not talking about the mysterious riddle that Guillermo Del Toro posted on Friday night on the Hellboy II website. Apparently we are soon to get definite good news that Del Toro will officially be directing the two films, though it remains murky as to exactly when this will happen.

For a long time, though, we’ve heard nothing about the Tolkien Trust’s lawsuit against New Line Cinema over the percentage of gross revenues from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy allegedly owed to the Tolkien heirs. On February 18, I posted an extensive entry analyzing the original complaint in that case, filed on February 11.

As I mentioned in that entry, New Line would have had to file a response to the complaint before a certain deadline. Now I learn that on April 9, attorneys from the law firm that the studio hired to handle the case filed a request for an extension of the deadline. That in itself isn’t big news. Courts commonly grant such extensions, and some courts are quite lenient about them.

The interest in the request comes in the reasons given given in the documents filed on April 9. These suggest that talks and other measures to try and resolve the matter out of court are actively going on. There are two documents involved. The first is a declaration in favor of the extension was filed by New Line’s lawyers, Brad D. Brian, Mark B. Helm, Lisa J. Demsky, and Eric P. Tuttle, of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP. This is brief and doesn’t contain a lot of information.

The second is “A Stipulation and Order Extending Time to Respond of Complaint,” filed by the same lawyers. The document presents a very interesting summary of what has been happening behind the scenes since February 11:

Whereas, defendants were served with the summons and complaint in this action on or about February 11, 2008 or February 12, 2008;

Whereas, on or about March 6, 2008, the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson was retained to represent Defendants in this matter;

Whereas, on or about March 7, 2008, the parties agreed to an initial 30-day extension of time to respond to the Complaint;

Whereas, the parties are not submitting this request for any dilatory or improper purpose. Rather, the parties have engaged in discussions relating to a potential resolution of this matter; in conjunction with these discussions, Defendants have agreed to provide certain documents to Plaintiffs in connection with Plaintiffs’ audits of the motion pictures at issue in this matter, and the parties are in the process of discussing the logistics of this process;

Whereas, in order to facilitate their further discussions to these ends, Plaintiffs and Defendants have agreed to set the response date to the Complaint for Defendants on May 14, 2008.

That sounds encouraging to me. The Tolkien Trust and New Line are at least in talks. They have twice been able to agree on extensions in the deadline for the studio to file a response to the complaint. The two sides appear to have been in discussions since around March 7, and New Line has agreed to let the Trust look at some documents relevant to an audit, presumably regarding the income and expenses relating to the trilogy.

Such moves suggest to me that both sides have some reason to believe that the case can be settled. The Trust has not filed an injunction barring New Line from beginning production on The Hobbit. The filmmakers keep hinting that the project is slowly moving toward an official start of pre-production. Surely co-producers New Line and MGM would not launch into spending money on the films without having some confidence that there will be no court order for them to turn over the production rights to the Tolkien Trust (one of the punitive points in the original complaint).

So fans have some reason, I think, to be cautiously optimistic that the delay in production that the lawsuit seemed to threaten may be fairly short.

(As before, my thanks for James Peterson of Godfrey & Kahn, S.C. here in Madison, Wisconsin, for helping me keep up to date on the progress of the lawsuit.)