One of the Rosebud Sleds From ‘Citizen Kane’ Just Became the Second Most Expensive Piece of Movie Memorabilia Ever Sold

The iconic prop, which went for $14.75 million at auction, is one of several sleds used in the production of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic

Sonja Anderson

– Daily Correspondent

July 18, 2025 5:21 p.m.

A red wooden sled marked with the name “Rosebud” just sold for $14.75 million at auction. The artifact is one of the sleds used in the making of director Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), and it’s now the second most expensive piece of film memorabilia ever sold.

Citizen Kane tells the story of a publishing tycoon named Charles Foster Kane, a character Welles based on William Randolph Hearst. The movie begins with a dying Kane’s last word, “Rosebud.” Nobody can figure out what this word means, but the final scenes of the film reveal the answer: Rosebud is a child’s sled, which workers throw into a fire.

The recently auctioned sled was owned by director Joe Dante, best known for Gremlins (1984). As he tells Intelligent Collector’s Harlan Lebo, he acquired his Rosebud while working on Explorers (1985) on the Paramount lot. The lot once housed RKO Pictures, which produced Citizen Kane.

“One of the crew who knew I was a fan of vintage films came to me with a wood prop and said, ‘They’re throwing out all of this stuff. You might want this,’” Dante tells the publication. “I was astonished. Since I am a huge fan of the movie, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be glad to take it.’”

As Welles told the Washington Post’s Stephanie Zaharoudis and Charles Fishman in 1982, at least four identical sleds were used in the film’s production. One was burned during filming. Another went to Tom Mankiewicz, a relative of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote Citizen Kane’s screenplay with Welles. One was awarded to a 12-year-old Arthur Bauer in a 1942 contest run by RKO Pictures. (The “Bauer sled,” which he used as a plant stand, sold for $233,500 at a Christie’s auction in 1996.)

Another was recovered from a garbage heap outside RKO’s old prop vault and sold at a 1982 Sotheby’s auction, where Steven Spielberg bought it for $60,500. The director kept his sled hanging in his office for years before donating it to the Academy Museum in 2018. As he told the New York Times in 1982, Citizen Kane is “the most classic movie ever made,” and the Rosebud sled is “a symbolic emblem of quality in the film business.”

Citizen Kane’s Rosebud revelation is often ranked among the best plot twists in film history. As Welles said in a 1941 statement from RKO, “It was necessary that my character be a collector—the kind of man who never throws anything away. I wished to use as a symbol—at the conclusion of the picture—a great expanse of objects—thousands and thousands of things—one of which is Rosebud.”

Dante placed his Rosebud in scenes of several of his own productions, including The Burbs (1989) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Recently, however, he decided to sell the prop. In a statement from Heritage Auctions, Dante says he’s had “the honor of protecting this piece of cinematic history for decades.”

When the sled sold to an unnamed buyer, it became the second most valuable piece of film memorabilia ever purchased—after a pair of Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, which went for $32.5 million last winter. Heritage Auctions included the sled in a larger sale of movie artifacts, including a whip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Bob Peak’s original art for Apocalypse Now (1979).

“These aren’t just props. They’re mythic objects,” says Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions’ executive vice president, in the statement. “They tell the story of Hollywood’s greatest moments, one piece at a time, each tied to a memory, a performance, a legend.”