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From what I hear, Compass will be a modest success, but it's unlikely that New Line will risk $200-300M on a sequel. For one thing, even if the overseas performance is huge -- and it's doing well, up to $187M as of this past weekend -- New Line sold the foreign distribution, so it won't see a big share of the foreign pie.
New Line typically does movies that are around $40M and under. They don't have the resources of a big studio to soak up the losses of a true loser. LotR was a big gamble for them, and it paid off. They'll probably get out of Compass with a modest profit, but I don't see them risking that kind of money again, especially with a seeming surefire Hobbit one-two punch in the pipeline.
Time will tell. Neither franchise will go forward until the strike's over. They have a script for SK, but I highly doubt they'd put it into production without the ability to do rewrites even if Compass was a blockbuster.
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