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Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse
whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
this really isn't a big deal... worst case scenario, they'll just have to throw a lot of money at fox to get 'em off their case.
-- derby
Keep on promoting those arts and sciences, Copyright Law!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
There is a more detailed account - including a useful chronology - over at Deadline Hollywood Daily if you are so inclined.
Assuming that version of events is correct, then it looks like Fox may still have a legitimate claim on distribution rights for Watchmen. If so, then this lawsuit is probably more likely a way for them to get a cut of the action rather than to stop the whole thing outright.
Why the hell didn't Fox realise this before?
They behave like that guy who says "if she won't love me, then she won't love anyone" when it comes to their copyrights. They won't even license them to someone who thinks they can do a better job, such as was the case with Firefly. Now they are threatening to do the same to this movie.
"Warner Bros.' production and anticipated release of 'The Watchmen' motion picture violates 20th Century Fox's long-standing motion picture rights in 'The Watchmen' property," Fox said in a statement, though the graphic novel's title is simply "Watchmen."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117990722.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2563
Nice goin', Fox. You don't even know you're talking about.
i won't hate fox for the sake of both firefox and megan fox
Who wants to see a movie about a bunch of Swiss artisans in their underwear?
Maybe they did and just wanted to keep it to themselves after the trailers circulated for a bit.. build the hype before making demands?
Unless Fox learned of this production through said hype, Warner could use this as evidence of Fox's prejudicial delay. It's probably not enough for estoppel by laches, but it might convince the judge to rule less favorably to Fox. But aren't Fox Warner's attorneys anyway?
They did, but if you show your hand early enough, the project is simply scrapped and you don't get any money. You have to wait until the project is all but released (with tons of money already spent) before you come forward with your claims, as that way the choice becomes "Buy us off with some of the money or lose *everything*."
The only item of significance here is that apparently Fox is asking for a large enough amount of money that WB sees fit to argue the point in court instead of just paying and being done with it. It is likely, then, that Fox believes the movie will perform better than WB believes it will perform, as that would be the basis for the amount they demanded versus the amount WB would be willing to pay.
Basically, then, this is just business as usual, and the headlines are simply being used by either side to try to put more pressure on the opposing side. In the end, the movie will certainly be released. If WB wins the case, Fox should have asked for a smaller windfall. If Fox wins the case, WB should've settled for the earlier Fox offer. Someone loses (maybe both do), but we don't have to care.
The damn thing is going to be heart-breakingly bad anyhow from what I've seen & read about it.
That is what I had assumed. I didn't figure there was any way Hollywood could possibly turn out a decent version of Watchmen.
But then I read this, and now I'm vaguely hopeful.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
From comment on Deadline Hollywood Daily above:
4) Waiting - Waiting is a common game in Hollywood. When you see someone doing something you don't like, you usually wait until they are fairly pregnant, because that's where the money is. Had Fox stepped in the second they saw this occur, the movie probably just wouldn't have gotten made by WB, and Fox would be sitting on a property they hadn't developed in decades. BUT... by waiting until WB finished production, now there's money! Now Fox can see some cash because WB is so pregnant that they have to do something to release the movie. It is possible that WB can make an equitable claim of laches (sitting around trying to maximize the damages), but that's in equity, not in law; and that's strictly up to the court.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
From what I've read, the theatrical release will be toned down, and fans of the book should wait until the full version comes out on DVD. I also read that they've added in some action scenes to make a better movie, and that it is *chock* full of sexiness... The uncut version will probably be rated 18+.
I'm of mixed feelings -- but as always, I have low expectations. That way, if it's decent, I'll be pleasantly surprised.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
if they screw up the release schedule, fox reaps massive ill will from the distributors
if they cancel, fox won't make any money on their claim
what will happen is the lawyers will argue about numbers, fox will get $25 million, and fox will walk away
this happened on the johnny knoxville/ jessica simpson dukes of hazzard movie. the legal wrangling left some producers with a claim on the property with $17 million
someone looks red faced in wb legal, they screwed up
better analysis at aintitcool.com
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Watchmen delayed, or better There, fixed that for ya!
None of this "or worse" crap. We all know it's about the money. Fox won't do anything that doesn't make them money, and for them to make money, they need this movie to be released. With Fox as partners, of course.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
No wonder Alan Moore gets so annoyed over what's done to his old works...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So in this case, a piece of work written by a couple of guys who are still alive, which was released not too long ago, and someone paid a lot of money for the rights to make and distribute a movie version of, you feel that this is a poor example of copyright law? I actually think this is an excellent example of the system working properly. If this was a work from 100 years ago, yeah, you'd have a legitimate beef. But copyright law needs to exist in some way.
Put into another way, it is a company A (in this case Fox) trying to prevent company B (in this case Warner) from releasing a piece of work (in this case a movie), on the ground that company A still has some rights secured for the corresponding IP.
I actually think this is a wonderful example of how the system is broken. If this was a company releasing a movie without paying the authors, yeah, you'd have a legitimate beef.
But in this case, the authors will get paid anyway from company B. Its just an infight between company A and B with company A trying to get a piece of the lucrative cake, even if it's B who put the biggest part of the effort into producing the movie.
Copyright law exist to protect the original author from abuses, so that the result of their hard working and sweating aren't used without proper compensation.
This isn't the case.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Allow Warner Bros to release the movie into theatres on the promise that Warner show a bunch of trailers for Fox movies. I'm pretty sure a similar thing happened regarding Austin Powers, but I could be wrong.
Summation 2
If it is the same character, in the same type of scenario, it is still under copyright. I just wish that the law were more lenient or that copyright law wouldn't extend through the better part of a century.
http://www.allen-poole.com/
Some real bullshit in your post here we need corrected.
1) Alan Moore DOESNT DO MOVIES... PERIOD. It would have been 100% impossible for the author to be involved when the author ABSOLUTELY FUCKING REFUSES TO BE REGARDLESS OF QUALITY.
2) From everything seen and printed they are being as faithful as possible to the book down to the color scheme of key scenes which are staying on the pastel range like the comic. They are going so faithful as to keep everything minus black freighter, which WILL BE IN THE DVD which will be clocking in at over 5 hours. The movie cut it to keep from going over 3 hours. The movie is planned to be just shy of 3 hours. Everyone who was involved in the comic minue Moore has been involved in the movie from the start. Its just Moore who has become somewhat a recluse. Dave Gibbons even begged him to reconsidered, telling him he would like what they where doing and Moore would have none of it.
Get your facts straight bub before you start spouting off rumor. They are positively being faithful to the book, and Moore chose not to be involved so that he could "bash it with a clear conscious" his quote, they didnt keep him out. Moore got burned and now takes it out on EVERYTHING regardless of quality.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Stories like this blow me away. I have no idea what the budget on this picture is, can't be arsed to look it up, but Dark Knight was $150 mil before marketing so I would not be surprised if Watchmen is in the same ballpark. That's a shitload of money, people. I know if I had to answer for it, I'd be paying lawyers up one side and down the other to make sure that there were no surprises. "Who's optioned this property in the past? We bought the rights now but are we sure we're free and clear on this, now encumbrances, no crazy surprises?" Funny thing, Ghostbusters the name was free and for the taking when it came to shooting a movie but there was a shitty live-action show with a similar name, Ghost Busters. So when they cut the licensing deal for toys and the cartoon, suddenly there's this other Ghost Busters product coming out with toys, a cartoon, and there was nothing they could do about that. So that's when they changed the name and branding of their product to the Real Ghostbusters.
But back to the original story. WTF? I seriously, seriously doubt that Fox's goal is to stop distribution. No, this is like patent squatting. The squatter does not want the target company to stop selling the product, that means the parent stops making money. No, no, no! The successful parasite does not kill the host! No, the squatter wants the mark to make lots and lots of money because that makes the squatter's take all the bigger. Fox will let this studio do all the work of putting the movie together and then get a juicy cut off the take.
It amazes me how such an elementary mistake could be made with such big dollars at stake. I see similar mistakes on a smaller scale all the time. The most common one is zoning screw-ups. Some poor schlub invests a lot of time and money in putting up a sports bar or some other business and later finds out that the area isn't zoned for it. What the hell? Shouldn't this have come out at some point during the process? Shouldn't his lawyer have seen it, shouldn't it have come up during permitting, applying for an alcohol license, something? And with this guy putting up so much money, you'd think he'd have done his homework. But no, so sorry, business goes buh-bye. Holy shit.
I saw another one of these where a builder didn't do the proper soil testing that was supposed to be done before beginning construction of a sub-division. The long and the short of it was that the lots needed massive preparation to support the weight of a house because a lot of infill was used. Was that prep done? Nope. So the slabs were cracking shortly after construction. WTF? Apparently it's a successful tactic to do fraudulently incompetent work under a corporation, then bankrupt it before the lawsuits are filed. I don't see how people can get away with it but they do.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Argh.
I saw the trailer when I went to go see Dark Knight a couple of weeks ago. At first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at, until I saw the pair of CGI-ified Billy Crudups floating around with the little atom symbol on their foreheads.
"Wait a minute. That looks like Dr. Manhattan."
Then the serious special effects started, and I saw The Comedian's smiley face button, and my eyes rolled back into my head and I went into a blissed-out fugue state. So, I dunno, maybe this is for the best, for the sake of my fragile sanity, but damn I wanted to see this movie.
Nice goin', Fox. You don't even know you're talking about.
Actually Fox does know what it's talking about. This isn't a trademark dispute (although "Watchmen" and "The Watchmen" are confusingly similar), it's a copyright dispute. Copyright covers expressions, and to the extend that the plot and characters of the movie are similar to the ones in the graphic novel, if Fox owns the rights to make movies of the novel, then WB is SOL.
I'm curious as to why WB's attorneys let this one get by them...
I don't understand how Warner Bros can presumably spend millions of dollars producing a movie without first securing the rights to the work the movie is based on. Do they not have a legal department?
"Do not believe?" These guys kill me. Do you have a legal document with the copyright holder's signature on it saying you are entitled to make a movie based on their character? If you don't, it's probably not a good idea to green-light the project. I guess they're just used to doing as they please and letting their lawyers fight with anyone who gets in their way.
Unbelievable.
I don't care why you're posting AC
You can never know for sure who the copyright holder of a work is. Even if you know who created it you can't be sure that they didn't already sell the copyright to someone else.
What if an author was tricked into signing away the copyright (or at least exclusive movie rights) but didn't realise they had done so then later signed another movie deal with a different studio. What if the contract with the first movie studio was somewhat ambiguous as to whether it was exclusive or not?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If the Watchmen movie is killed due to copyright reasons I will destroy the universe.
Have a Nice Day,
Dr. Manhattan
I don't understand how Warner Bros can presumably spend millions of dollars producing a movie without first securing the rights to the work the movie is based on. Do they not have a legal department?
Yes, but it's too busy fighting pirates, YARRR!
Yeah, I guess five years of SCO vs the universe demonstrates that.
Is that what happened here? Did Alan Moore sign away the movie rights to Fox, then turn around and sell them to Warner? Did Warner not do their "due diligence" and have thier lawyers review all relevant documents before entering in to a business relationship with the author? Did they *just* find out that Fox believes they own the rights to the property now, when the movie is already shot?
I agree with you that these issues can sometimes be cloudy - the SCO example again really illustrates this. But I think it is laughable that it got this far without anyone noticing that there may be a question as to whether or not they had the right to make the movie in the first place. Either Fox is lying, Alan Moore withheld information from Warner, or the Warner lawyers didn't do a very thorough job.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Hmm... the Author didn't sell his rights to Fox or Warner, he sold them to DC, under a very specific contract, that he now regrets. DC sold the rights to various film companies. Of course, if the author had his way, there would never be a Watchmen movie, and he is refusing to accept any profits or residuals that are rightfully his because he hates the idea of this movie coming out at all.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Do you have a legal document with the copyright holder's signature on it saying you are entitled to make a movie based on their character? If you don't, it's probably not a good idea to green-light the project.
DC Comics is owned by Warner Bros and has been since at least the early '70s. Watchmen was published in the mid '80s, before comic creators truly asserted their muscle and won creator rights, so as far as I know, DC holds the copyright to Watchmen. (I can't imagine Alan Moore owning the copyright because he would never have allowed a movie based on his work to made in the first place.)
Now if somehow the rights got away from DC/Warner Bros and they didn't realize it until they had all but finished a movie, then yeah, that's a major legal gaff and someone's head ought to roll.
Alan Moore and DC had a contract that was good for the time. As soon as Watchmen goes out of print, all the rights revert to him. However, as long as DC is publishing the comic, the rights belong to DC. Obviously, it hasn't ever gone out of print, and likely won't until it falls into the public domain. I read somewhere that DC has the Devil on retainer to help them with their contract writing.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
the number of directors and studios that this project has passed through since Paul Greengrass then Terry Gilliam tried to helm it, and later Darran Aronofsky (though it might have been Gilliam first I'm not 100%), would make it murky as to who was in there first. One thing is for sure, Fox is just trying it on because they want in on a cash cow like Snyder's film of "300".
FurtherMoore (bad pun, I know) it actually seems like it was the producer that hasn't been paying Fox and not any of the other studios. In which case I imagine it would not so much be the blame lying at the feet of Warner Bros legal Dept but rather with the original producer (Lawrence Gordon is still on imdb.com as the producer and he was the one that originally grabbed Gilliam for the project).
I'm hoping it does get released and comes good with a decent interpretation of the text and it's themes. However I think if it sucks everyone will wish it was left alone. That said Snyder seems to be aiming for something that will please Moore, assuming the studio doesn't cut the shit out of it.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Geek Alert: Watchmen Movie in Trouble With Fox Suit
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
You wouldn't get sued over copyright. Just like Fox isn't suing over trademark. See how this works?
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Fox doesn't want to shut down the movie. Hiring lawyers to pursue this in court is, from the perspective of an executive, a business decision. It wouldn't be done unless there was a profit to be made.
So, where's the profit? There are two possibilities.
1) Fox is planning on releasing their own "Watchmen" film, and they want theirs to debut first.
This is an unlikely scenario. The Watchmen is not a well-known mainstream franchise and if they had already started production, we'd probably have heard of it. If they haven't started production yet, then the businessmen are probably more interested in scenario 2, since it has a guaranteed return (guaranteeing a return on investment is important in business. Yes, this includes lawyer fees, and everything else).
2) Fox sees that they can get a portion of royalties or a settlement from WB for the licensing rights they're entitled to.
This is the most likely scenario. Fox will show that they own the copyright, WB will be up shit creek without a paddle because they've produced a movie they aren't legally entitled to release, and then WB will settle out-of-court with Fox for 10% of the royalties, or $20 million, or something similar. My prediction is that we'll see the movie eventually, but there is a possibility that it will be delayed due to proceedings (however, WB will have a great incentive to settle before the theatrical release date, Fox probably realizes this). There is also a distinct possibility that the producer will not enjoy as much of the profits as they would have.
But we will still get our movie. Of course, depending on the nature of the settlement, you may want to boycott the box office in order to minimize Fox's profit (they are, after all, peddlers of pedantic mind-rotting boob-tube junk).