Fox Sues Warner Bros. Over ‘Watchmen’
Yesterday we reported that a lawsuit filed by J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate and publisher HarperCollins against New Line Cinema could impede production of "The Hobbit" films, and now another much anticipated film could become mired in legal limbo.
20th Century Fox filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over "Watchmen," the big-screen adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic novel currently in production. According to Fox, Warner Bros. does not own the rights to produce such a film, with Fox citing a complicated string of ownership conditions that the studio alledges were never secured by Warner Bros.
According to the Hollywood Reporter:
Fox seeks to enjoin Warners from going forward with the project, saying in the lawsuit that it seeks to "restrain (Warner Bros. Pictures) from taking actions that violate Fox’s copyrights and which stand to forever impair Fox’s rights to control the distribution and development of this unique work."
Must be a damned "complicated string of ownership conditions" for Fox to hold the rights over Warner on a book published by DC.
It's the movie rights that are in dispute, not the ownership of the property itself. Although Alan might dispute that.Watchmen was around quite a number of studios for decades. Terry Gilliam and I spent an hour discussing it right after Warner Bros. fired his ass off the project, and that was back in 1991. He was pissed; he really, really wanted to do Watchmen at that time and he spent a lot of energy on the project. Warners later put the movie in turnaround. I'm not sure when Fox picked it up, but it'll take a battalion of lawyers to straighten it out. Just like Spider-Man, which took a couple decades to straighten out. Here, at least, Watchmen is in production and judges tend to dislike throwing people out of work unless there's a clear contractual violation.
Fox. That would be the folks who canceled Firefly.
Too bad. These works have a currency (not to mention zeitgeist) that gets muddled when the works take too long to get adapted. The Gone With the Wind movie was out in the third year following publication.
I H A T E lawyers. Well…unless I'm arrested or sued…or want to sue…or…I have a deal I need looked at. Damn. OK I H A T E lawyers unless they are working for me.
Michael put his finger on it.Without lawyers we'd be having duels on the street every day. I know it's fashionable to use that Shakespeare quote all the time, and I know some lawyers are at least professionally loathsome, but by and large the system works okay. They're an unfortunate by-product of capitalism.