Back on December 16, I wrote a short entry on “The Irony of New Line’s Success.” At that point I was linking to a Patrick Goldstein story in the Los Angeles Times online. Now Dave McNary offers more indication of that irony, plus some interesting new information, on Variety’s website.

As McNary points out, when New Line was absorbed into Warner Bros. early last year, its staff was trimmed from 600 to 40. (Fortunately, some of the staff were moved over to the parent studio.) Yet with less than a tenth the staff, New Line is making about as many films as it had been when functioning as an independent company within the Time Warner conglomerate.

And, as I mentioned in December, some of those films are quite successful. Sex and the City, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and Four Christmases did well. (Harold and Kumar didn’t gross a huge amount, but it didn’t cost much, either. A Harold and Kumar 3 is in the works.) McNary says tracking on New Line’s romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You, due out February 6, suggests that it will be a success as well. All these films were greenlit before New Line ceased to function on its own. As McNary puts it, New Line in its present guise is arguably one of the most important indies in the film business, except it’s not an indie.

A lot of the credit is being given to Toby Emmerich, here seen on the right at the Domino premier on October 11 2005, with then New Line president Bob Shaye, left, and Samuel Hadida, French distributor of The Lord of the Rings and other New Line films. Emmerich took over running the studio when  Shaye and co-president Michael Lynne departed, “with the autonomy enjoyed by the founders but with the benefit of Warners’ massive marketing and distribution organization. By all accounts, Emmerich has stayed on an even keel with Warner Bros.” Films he hopes to have in the pipeline for 2010 release are a Sex and the City sequel and a video-game adaptation, Gears of War.

New Line is pretty important to Warner Bros.—quite apart from the fact that The Hobbit and “Film 2” seem sure-fire hits. According to the article, “New Line’s output of six films a year makes it among the single largest contributors to the Warner pipeline, which features such heavyweights as David Heyman, Legendary Pictures, Joel Silver and Village Roadshow.”

There are still several New Line films greenlit while Bob Shaye was still president that have just come out or will be released this year: Inkheart (released last week), Friday the 13^th (February 13, of course), My Sister’s Keeper, 17 Again, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. The Time Traveler’s Wife was the last film that New Line financed by pre-selling individual countries’ distribution rights. That approach, common for independent producers, was how much of LOTR’s considerable budget was raised. When the same approach failed for The Golden Compass, which made far more abroad than in the U.S., Time Warner’s new president Jeff Bewkes seized on it as a reason for ending the firm’s autonomy. Time Traveler isn’t due out under February of 2010, so the results of the old incarnation of New Line—and hence the long-term impact of LOTR on that company—are still going on.

Interestingly, one of New Line’s projects likely to be greenlit this year is an English-language remake of the Spanish ghost film The Orphanage. Guillermo Del Toro was a producer on the original, and he’ll be a producer on this version as well. (One would almost think the man had spare time to fill!) Other possible OKs include Going the Distance, a raunchy romantic comedy; The Grackle, a Matthew McConaughey comedy; Horrible Bosses, directed by Frank Oz; and a spinoff of He’s Just Not That Into You.

There’s also a fantasy, Jack the Giant Killer; a reality-based exorcism story, The Rite; an adaptation of Rock of Ages; and the revival of the Nightmare on Elm Street series to celebrate its 25^th anniversary.

I’d say all this bodes pretty well for The Hobbit. With New Line maintaining some of its old freedom and its old approach and turning out films that are profitable for Warner Bros., maybe Peter and Guillermo’s team will be able to do the film the way they want. It worked well for the trilogy!