Summations Only

As I understand it, most films don't make a profit anyway. People continue to make films because people like to produce art. With less of a profit incentive, of course, we may see less big budget Hollywood style films, since it will be harder to get investment from people only seeing it as a money making vehicle.There would still be incentive to produce special effects bonanzas along the lines of Transformers, or superhero films, for merchandising reasons. They might look even more like expensive toy adverts than they already do, however.

International sales "may" have doubled that? Holland is a tiny market, with a population smaller than the New York metropolitan area. It's international box office gross was more than 20 million Euros. Box office figures are also only a small part of the revenue stream for a film. A typical Hollywood film makes more on both DVD sales and on licencing for TV than it does at the cinema, so looking at the domestic gross doesn't tell us much about the overall financial success of a production.

'Halfling' is actually a word from Scots English that predates Tolkein by a century or two, meaning either a short person or a young person.I'm not that sympathetic to NoNukes' position, but to be fair the topic you're arguing here is a bit of a seperate one to the whole debate. I think you'll find few people, beyond the holders of the rights involved, that wouldn't agree the length of some intellectual property is ridiculous. There is no justification for hobbits, Superman or Mickey Mouse not being in the public domain, their creators all being dead for some time. Whether a film produced in 2011 should still be protected by copyright law is a wholly seperate question.