In 1984, while working on the former RKO Pictures lot, director Joe Dante came across a worn wooden sled that had been set aside with no indication of its significance. He recognized it as the sled from Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane . He kept it in his personal collection for the next 41 years. That sled sold at Heritage Auctions on July 16, 2025, for $14.75 million.
Researchers LaSaleta and Vohs in their 2014 paper titled “Nostalgia Weakens the Desire for Money,” in the Journal of Consumer Research, stated that when it comes to money, nostalgia can make us less concerned about it, and more inclined to pay crazy prices for things that remind us of it. That, in essence, is the whole Rosebud saga in a sentence from an academic standpoint. And it is a story worth explaining why a prop sled from the 1940's suddenly turned into a financial event in 2025.
The sled that nobody wanted
Citizen Kane is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made by many, and its studio was not even concerned enough to safeguard its biggest prop. Dante’s inheritance of Rosebud wasn't a formal studio gift or handoff. It was lying around unlabeled and unloved on a lot where no one knew what they were looking at, and that is how he found it. As the Smithsonian Magazine’s 2009 report on Hollywood's memorabilia mess points out, most film artifacts in the past were cast aside, left behind in a film studio, or, in some truly bizarre instances, even in a costume store, because no one in Hollywood considered them worthy of preservation. Hollywood is great at making history, not preserving it.
