First of all, yes to all of this.
But something I think should be highlighted is the difference between the Disney franchise model, and a lot of previous franchise models, and why the Disney model sucks.
If you, say, write an original novel, and it gets published in a traditional publishing house, they will give you a check up front and also pay you royalties, that is, a percentage of the profits the book makes. (If you’re asking “why don’t you get ALL the profit, if you’re the sole author?” the answer is that the editors, typesetters, printers, cover artist, advertisers, and bookstores need to get paid, too; they aren’t producing and selling your book out of the goodness of their heart.) If the book is a flop, you’ll get nothing but the up-front check; if it’s a smash hit that sells a lot really quickly and then gets forgotten about, you’ll get a lot of money in the first year and not much thereafter; if it becomes a classic or perennial favorite you will have a small but steady stream of revenue trickling in for years.
When Disney hires someone to create something for a franchise they own, they do not pay royalties. They never have, to the best of my knowledge. The contract is a strict one off, work-for-hire. You create something to their specifications, they give you a check, and off you go. If the thing you created is the greatest of its kind ever, you don’t get royalties. Disney can profit for the next century, but you don’t get anything. This is legal, because when you signed the contract you agreed to it--you got all your money up front, not tied to the success or failure of your creation. If your creation is a failure, this is a really good deal, because you’ll make more money. If your creation does medium-well, it’s a toss-up, because you might have made more money with royalties, but you might not; and the accounting and business angle is simpler if you get a lump sum vs. dribs and drabs trickling in for the next couple of years. But if your work is a great success ... then not getting royalties for it means the contract was a really terrible deal for you and a great deal for Disney.
But the thing is, Disney has spent the last several years buying up franchises from other people and corporations. And some of those franchises did pay royalties, at least for some authors. See, especially back in the 70s through the 90s, if you wanted a big-name author to write a novelization or tie-in (and thus have a better chance of that book selling well), offering royalties was how you did it. Because sure, there were a lot of mid-list or bottom-list or newbie authors who would write work-for-hire (i.e. payment up front but no royalties) just because they needed the cash. For a newbie or bottom-list or mid-list author, they might actually make more money doing work-for-hire for a major franchise than they would writing their own original stuff. You churn out a novel to their specifications, you take your check, pay your bills, and then go back to writing the stuff you actually want to write. Which is why so many novelizations and tie-ins are mediocre at best. But a major author (who might do a better job, and who would attract readers who otherwise don’t bother with tie-ins and novelizations) wouldn’t take a contract like that because they’d make more money on their own stuff where they would get royalties.
Alan Dean Foster was one of the leading SF/F authors of the late 20th Century. And he had a positive talent for writing tie-ins and novelizations and making them really good. Which is why he got good contracts with royalties to write those books instead of them being work-for-hire, and also why many of those books are still in print and still selling steadily, today, literally 40 years later, decades after most of the other tie-ins and novelizations of that era are out of print.
So even after snaffling up all these other franchises, there probably aren’t too many authors who wrote books that Disney now owns the rights to who are due royalties. And most of the books Disney now owns where the authors are due royalties ... it probably doesn’t matter much because the books are old enough that they haven’t sold many copies in the last decade or so, so it’s a moot point.
I bet that what happened was that Disney doesn’t have anyone on staff who actually handles figuring out who is owed royalties and how much, because ... they’ve never had to deal with royalties because they do everything work-for-hire. So then Alan Dean Foster, one of the few people who a) wrote novels that Disney now owns the rights to, b) is entitled to royalties on them, and c) those novels actually sell enough on a regular basis to generate royalties, starts asking why he’s not getting his quarterly check. And Disney is like, who does this dude think he is, why should we pay him for books that he wrote forty years ago, he’s already been paid, we own the books now fair and square.
Except that’s not what the contract says. And now they’re trying to wiggle out of it.
I hope they get laughed out of court and have to pay not only the royalties but any legal bills Foster may have.
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