Lynne’s expertise in financing served the company well. Moreau” in 1996, as well as a controversial 1998 article in Premiere magazine that accused New Line of fostering a boys’-club atmosphere where sexual harassment occurred. As Variety put it in 2004, “Lynne often is described as the smooth, button-down counterpart to Shaye’s gruff introvert.” The studio weathered box-office failures like “The Island of Dr. That year also brought another huge hit for the studio, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” which was made for $13.5 million and earned 10 times that just in the United States. Lynne president and chief operating officer. He also joined the New Line board, and in 1986 he played a crucial role in taking the company public. He became the studio’s general counsel in 1984, the same year it released one of its biggest early successes, the horror movie “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which cost less than $2 million to make and brought in more than $25 million at the box office. Lynne was an entertainment lawyer in the early 1980s when he began advising his old Columbia Law School classmate Robert Shaye, who had founded New Line in 1967.

His daughter, Elizabeth Planet, said the cause was cancer.

Michael Lynne, who helped engineer a bold expansion of the once tiny studio New Line Cinema that culminated in its release of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, one of the most successful movie franchises in history, died on Monday in Manhattan.

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