With an estimated £7m price tag, the pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's newborn twins Hello! rushed into print today lay claim to being the world's most expensive baby snaps.
Over 17 glossy pages, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon Jolie-Pitt make their celebrity magazine debut in a deal said to have cost Hello! magazine £3.5m for the international rights.
US celebrity magazine People is estimated to have paid a further £3.5m for the North American and Puerto Rican rights, making a total price tag of about £7m – a new benchmark in chequebook journalism has been set.
The popularity of Brangelina – as celebrity magazines dub the two Hollywood stars - across Europe guarantees sales, which might partly explain why Hello! felt it could up its cover price 50p to £2.50 for the special issue, which will remain on sale for a fortnight.
They are dressed almost entirely in white in the Hello! pictures: Brad and Angelina look glowing and their newborn babies look like, well, newborn babies, keeping their eyes closed for the entire duration of the photoshoot, taken by Getty Images.
The couple's two year old child Shiloh and three adopted children - six-year-old Maddox, from Cambodia; Zahara, three, from Ethiopia and four-year-old Pax from Vietnam - are all pictured holding the twins.
The Hello! spread also reveals a certain liberalness in the Jolie-Pitt household, with the older children being allowed to paint their nails and put coloured highlights in their hair.
The magazine couldn't wait to release its cover online at 12.01am today, trumpeting "EXCLUSIVE! Brad and Angelina share their beautiful family with us".
In the Hello! interview, done at the family's rented estate in Provence, France, the proud parents explain how they prepped their four older children with an episode of Dora the Explorer to explain the arrival of the twins.
In the article they discuss their desire for a large family and also the birth. Pitt: " I felt an awe that words fail to describe."
Pitt and Jolie established a relationship with Hello! in 2006 when their first child together, Shiloh Nouvel, was born in Namibia. They sold pictures of her to Hello! and the couple donated the fee to charity.
"They are the two biggest stars as a couple in the world. Last time they did this it was proven to be successful, since then we have become even more celebrity obsessed unfortunately," celebrity agent Max Clifford said.
"OK! has had one or two big issues in recent times, including the Rooney wedding so they had to compete. What they are hoping is that they put on circulation and then they keep some of it.
Richard Desmond's OK! was understood to have dropped out of the bidding for the Brangelina baby pics at about £3m.
Hello!, which started in Spain and has editions in Greece, Russia, United Arab Emirates, India, Turkey, Greece and Serbia, as well as the UK, has already brought in some revenue by selling the pictures on to New Idea magazine in Australia.
"Hello! really do need to be seen to be bringing in the really big ones from time to time," Clifford said.
The magazine, which increased the print run for this week's special issue, declined to comment on what it paid for the Pitt-Jolie pictures.
All the money will be donated to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, which helps sick and disadvantaged children around the world.
Publication of the Pitt-Jolie twins pictures will substantially boost the magazine's circulation, which averaged 405,615 copies a week in the second half of 2007, down 1.7% year on year. But OK! is more than 280,000 issues ahead each week.
While the pictures will provide a much needed circulation fillip, the Vivienne and Knox special edition will not come close to Hello!'s all time best seller.
The magazine's issue commemorating Princess Diana's funeral in September 2007 sold 1.1m copies.
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