It's remarkable in hindsight, but 2001 marked the start of two film franchises that would go on to generate billions of dollars at the box office - sparking billions more in merchandise and associated revenues too.
But the release of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films was also a watershed moment for another reason, as it made studios realise that having the right film rights could result in not just one hit - but potentially years and years of box office success.
And that led to studios scrambling to get rights to popular book series - modern ones like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, but also older bodies of work - like CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.
Not too long after that you see the streamers arrive on the scene, desperate for content to fill their catalogues with. They have lots of venture capital and tech money, too, and so the competition for the rights to books, characters and even authors' entire bodies of work - heats up even more.
Very quickly you have authors and their estates getting big money offers to hand over rights - turning what might have once been a relatively simple, custodian-style job into something very different.
An informal organisation tasked with overseeing an authors’ work until it falls out of copyright is suddenly fending off studios - as well as companies set up specifically to manage authors’ estates. But they’re also seeing the potential to make a lot more money than might have been the case.
But while some estates might have been caught by surprise by this shift, some were ahead of the curve.
Like who?
Ian Fleming optioned the rights to his existing and future James Bond books in 1954 - an idea that’s relatively common now but wasn’t really done back then.
At the time only two Bond books had been published and option he put on the market actually excluded the first of those - Casino Royale - which he’d sold the rights to in an earlier deal.
It was Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman who bought up the rights to any of Fleming’s other James Bond works - and they went on to develop what is now an iconic film franchise.
Separate to that, Fleming also did a deal relating to the actual books.
Shortly before he died, while playing golf with an old Eton school-friend - John Middleton Campbell - Fleming complained about the size of his tax bill. In particular he was concerned about the hefty taxes his family would face from his work once he died.
Campbell was chair of Booker McConnell - which at the time was a huge sugar producer. He suggested that they, as a favour, would take a majority stake in Fleming’s Gildrose Productions - and from there they could structure things in such a way that would lower the tax on his work’s revenue.
They would also be able to manage lots of the admin for him - like revenue from film rights, getting foreign translations of the books made.
The move ended up being such a success for Booker McConnell that they established an entire side-business around book rights - and eventually went on to sponsor a major literary prize, which is where the Booker Prize comes from.
The Fleming family eventually took back full control of his print work - now under Ian Fleming Productions.
And far from just managing his work after his death in 1964, it’s been very active in growing the Bond universe, It has brought in new authors to write new Bond stories, including a series of Young Bond books, spin-offs based around Moneypenny and Felix Leiter, and some graphic novels too.
The family at one stage said this was initially done to try and get ahead of some copycat and counterfeit Bond novels that others were trying to bring to the market after Fleming’s death.
Today there are around twice as many official Bond books written by other authors than those written by Fleming himself.
What about the film rights?
Saltzman sold his stake in the Bond films to United Artists, which in turn is acquired by MGM, but the Broccoli family retained full creative control over the series.
Albert’s daughter Barbara took over during the Brosnan years and was ultimately the one responsible for rebooting it - post Austin Powers - into the grittier Daniel Craig era.
The Broccolis continued to have creative control after Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion in 2022 - despite Bond being seen as the jewel in the crown of the studio, and despite many feeling Amazon bought MGM in order to milk the Bond universe for content for Prime Video.
That reportedly led to tension between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon about the direction of the franchise post-Daniel Craig, ultimately ending with Amazon whipping out the chequebook once more.
It is believed to have paid another $1 billion to acquire creative control of the Bond film universe from the Broccolis. Barbara and Co will continue to have a stake in it - so they’ll make more money - but they’ll no longer get a veto on what’s made.
So expect lots more Bond content in the years ahead.
(The Fleming family continue to get royalties from the films, too.)
What about Fleming’s friend Roald Dahl?
There weren’t too many films based on Roald Dahl’s work that were released while he was still alive but he was quite critical of most of what he did see.
He thought the music in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was 'saccharine, sappy and sentimental’ and he hated the changes made to the story - like the addition of the Slugworth subplot, or the way it focused more on Willy Wonka rather than Charlie.
That may be in part because he wanted Spike Milligan as Wonka, not Gene Wilder.
He also hated the 1990 version of The Witches - saying it was ‘utterly appalling’ - and he took issue with the fact that the boy gets turned back into a human at the end, rather than being left as a mouse.
It seems he had little sympathy for the challenges facing a screenwriter converting a book into a film. That’s despite his history in doing the same for two Ian Fleming books - You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Clearly he was very particular about how his work should be handled, but it doesn’t seem as though his estate are quite as discerning.
Since his death there have been many adaptations - including Danny DeVito’s Matilda, for example, which makes a number of left turns from the book - not least the fact that it’s set in America rather than England.
Dahl probably have hated Wonka, too, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel which invents a whole backstory for his character that he never sanctioned.
Whether he would have liked Neil Tennant’s not-so-sappy or saccharine songs is hard to know.
The movie based on James and the Giant Peach had lots of changes from the book too - as well as songs. And, of course, Matilda The Musical had plenty of music too… Though Dahl might have had a bit more time for that because it’s a more faithful adaptation of the book.
That musical started as a stage show but became a film through a deal Dahl’s estate did with Netflix.
Four years ago Netflix paid almost $700m to acquire the entire Dahl estate - including rights to make shows and films, but also games, musicals, plays and live experiences and books.
That means we can expect more adaptations - faithful or otherwise - in the years ahead.
Just this month Netflix released a film based on The Twits - though it seems to be very loosely based on it. Last year we also had what is the first ‘continuation’ book in the Dahl universe - The Twits Next Door - which is a licensed follow up to the 1980 original.
What about another beloved children’s author - Dr Seuss?
Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr Seuss as he’s best known, made a number of TV specials based on his books - perhaps, most famously, How the Grinch Stole Christmas - but he never made any movies.
That may be due to the fact that the one feature film he did write - The 50,000 Fingers of Dr T in 1953 - was a total failure.
He also shied away from doing much by way of merchandising, or exploiting his characters’ popularity in any way.
Two years after his death in 1991, his wife Audrey Geisel set up Dr Seuss Enterprises as a vehicle for managing his estate.
She started to farm out licences for different works based on his books - including the creation of a theme park ride at Universal Studios.
She also sparked a massive bidding war between studios for film rights. The LA Times reported at the time that people had to offer $3m up front just to get a meeting with her.
In the end Universal paid $5m upfront for the rights to the Grinch - as part of the deal Geisel would get a cut of the box office, and retained a significant amount of creative control.
In the end the script had to be rewritten multiple times until she was happy with it, and Jim Carrey had to meet with her to win her approval for the title role.
It all worked out, though, because the film was a smash hit.
But the next Seuss film project - The Cat in the Hat starring Mike Myers - didn’t fare so well. In fact it was such a flop that Geisel is said to have banned live action adaptations of Dr Seuss works ever since.
There have been a number of animated adaptations - but the most successful by far was the cartoon version of The Grinch.
There is a new Cat in the Hat animated movie set to come out next year, though.
And, of course, as people will remember from last Christmas, there is Seuss-related - in particular Grinch-related - merchandise everywhere now.
What about the Queen of Crime - Agatha Christie?
By the time she died in 1976 there hadn’t been an awful lot of her work exploited - despite her huge success as an author, it took a long time for film studios to see the potential.
It wasn’t really until the Albert Finney-led Murder on the Orient Express two years before she died that they woke up to her talent.
Despite that she was very well prepared in having her estate ready for what was to come. She had set up Agatha Christie Limited in the 1950s, in part to try to deal with the same tax burden that Ian Fleming had complained to his old friend about.
She also went on to sell a majority stake in her estate to Booker McConnell - the same company as Fleming - and by the time she had died most of the rest of the business had been distributed to members of her family.
That Booker stake has changed hands a few times since then, and is now held by Acorn Media, which is in turn owned by an American media company, RLJ Entertainment. It distributes TV and film, including through its own streaming service.
And given that those rights give you access to 66 novels and around 166 short stories - with Poirot and Mrs Marple appearing in many of those - and given the hundreds of millions of her books that have been sold over the years - you can see why they’d be in demand for a company looking to develop franchises of shows and films. We’ve seen that in action in recent years with Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot movie trilogy.
And Agatha Christie Limited still exists - holding the rest of the stake in her estate, and being operated now by her great grandson James Prichard.
They’ve published many ‘continuation’ books in the Poirot and Mrs Marple universes - which, according to James’ father Mathew, who was the previous CEO of the company, is also a good way to keep people interested in the back catalogue.
And you can go onto their website and contact them if you’re interested in adapting any of her work into a show or a film or a play, or even a video game…
You mentioned Lord of the Rings earlier - how is that estate managed?
A few years before his death, JRR Tolkien sold the film, stage and merchandising rights to the trilogy (as well as The Hobbit) to United Artists. He reportedly he didn’t make much money from that sale, and in the following years there were multiple unsuccessful attempts to convert the books into film.
It took until the turn of the millennium and Peter Jackon’s adaptation before gold was struck. But even that didn’t go smoothly from the point of view of the estate, because its charity arm - The Tolkien Trust - sued New Line Cinema claiming they had not gotten any money from the films, despite their success.
That case was settled, which ultimately paved the way for the Hobbit film trilogy to be made.
Since then the Tolkien Estate has also sold the TV rights to Amazon - for a whopping $250m. Along with the production costs of the first series, Amazon is believed to have spent around $1 billion in what was seen to be Jeff Bezos’ attempt at creating a Game of Thrones rival.
The audience reaction to the show has been pretty lacklustre but so far Amazon continues to back it - with the third season currently in production.
In terms of the books, before his death Tolkien had named his son Christopher his literary executor. In the years after his father’s death, Christopher Tolkien set about editing and publishing a number of unpublished pieces of related work - including the history of Middle Earth and its so-called bible The Silmarillion.
Christopher Tolkien died in 2020 but the family continue to control the author’s estate.
Though, unlike Agatha Christie’s estate - a visit to its website makes clear how disinterested it is in making further licensing deals relating to his work.
