The sled Charles Foster Kane longed for as he laid dying just made a killing at auction.
The famous prop from Orson Welles’s 1941 Hollywood classic Citizen Kane just hammered down for a record $14.75 million at auction. The iconic prop is now the second most-valuable piece of movie memorabilia ever sold, after Heritage’s 2024 sale of the Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz for $32.5 million. The house sold Rosebud on July 16, the second day of its Entertainment auction sessions in Dallas, to an unknown buyer.
Gremlins director Joe Dante was the seller of the coveted movie collectible; he was given the sled in 1984 while working on the former RKO Pictures studio lot, now home to Paramount. Only three versions of Rosebud are known to survive, one of which sold to producer-director Steven Spielberg in 1982 for $60,500. The third was sold to an anonymous buyer in 1996 for $233,000.
“To see Rosebud find a new home—and make history in the process—is both surreal and deeply gratifying,” Dante said in a press release. “It’s a testament to the enduring power of storytelling.”
The sled’s period authenticity was verified by scientific testing, and the item shows signs of wear and tear from production use. The original paint on the pine hardwood is intact if chipped, and several rails are missing—likely sacrificed to wartime scrap drives during filming.
Rosebud’s life on-screen has extended beyond Citizen Kane, with Dante featuring the sled as an Easter egg in his 1985 film Explorers, as well as The ‘Burbs (1989), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) and an episode of the early 90s series Eerie, Indiana.
“These aren’t just props,” Joe Maddalena, Heritage’s executive vice president, said in a press release. “They’re mythic objects. They tell the story of Hollywood’s greatest moments, one piece at a time, each tied to a memory, a performance, a legend.”
Earlier in the same day, artist Bob Peak’s original key painting for the cult classic 1979 film Apocalypse Now sold for a record-breaking $687,500. Aside from the iconic sled, Heritage’s blockbuster entertainment auction includes Indiana Jones’s bullwhip from The Last Crusade (1989), Luke Skywalker’s Red Five X-wing from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and the inscribed tablets from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments.