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Judge Rules Fox Has Copyright Claim To Watchmen
fermion writes "According to the NYT, a judge has decided that Fox owns the copyright to Watchmen, not Warner. Is this an example of copyright law becoming so complex that companies can abuse the court system to prevent competition, or just extreme incompetence by Warner? In the current business environment, either explanation is believable. Yet it is unbelievable that seasoned producers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a movie that they can't even release. It seems the judge didn't want to bring this to a jury, and maybe daring Warner to appeal, or Fox to settle." The article says that Fox acquired movie rights to the Watchmen story in the late 1980s, but budget disputes and personnel changes have muddied the waters; Wikipedia has a bit more on the "development hell" which has plagued the film project.
I know, like the whole time I was watching it I was like wtf? this isnt at all like the graphic nov@#(&$# Wait. I have not seen it. It has not been released. It may not be released now.
When did Hollywood come up with its own ideas in the past? They were just ripping off fresher ideas (with notable exceptions of course, but the exceptions didn't come from Hollywood, it came from certain individual filmmakers/writers/directors working for Hollywood)
Hypothetical question. If some artsy filmmaker made a low budget Watchmen movie that was really low budget, Im talking about uses visual symbolism instead of special effects, less than half a million budget, etc etc, that was absolutely in keeping with the spirit and meaning of the source work would you go watch it? Would you watch it over a Hollywooded version that was visually cool?
you don't need to. you can always make as many sequels as you need. just look at LotR.
as i understand it, Watchmen consists of only 12 standard comic books. and the hardcover release is listed on Amazon as having only 436 pages. it's not inconceivable that they could adapt the comic into a trilogy or quadrilogy/tetralogy. an adaptation doesn't have to be a word-for-word screen translation of the original work. otherwise, how would you ever adapt a comic book series like Ghost in the Shell, which spans across 3 volumes and totaling 834 pages? or how about Akira, which spans 6 volumes, each of which being anywhere from 288 pages to 440 pages?
full-length films generally have higher production values than TV series. you just don't get the same budget or writing & acting quality on TV. frankly, a well-produced film adaptation stands a much better chance of being good (and doing justice to its source material) than a TV series.
personally, i don't even think there's anything worth watching on TV outside of documentary shows (Horizon, Air Crash Investigations, Seconds to Disaster, Nova, Mythbusters, etc.). comedy is about the only fiction genre with decent quality programming on TV, and most of those are animated series like Futurama, American Dad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, South Park, etc. the last truly great non-animated TV series i saw was Arrested Development, but that canceled after only 2 seasons.
Some films take their source material seriously and change what they think is necessary in order to improve it as a film. Others seems to just want to change it all around for no good reason at all. Having listened to what Peter Jackson said in the extras, there no doubt in my mind that he knows how a good film should be. And then there's the plot of LotR, which doesn't fit that format at all. He shrank it, stretched it, tweaked it and rearranged it and I think the biggest testament of it all is how you most of the time don't notice it. Obviously bits and pieces were lost (Tom Bombadil) but in the hands of a lesser director LotR would easily become a mashup of incoherent scenes.
That said, some of the things are entirely Jackson's doing like Sam turning back which was never and would never have been a part of Tolkien's story. It heightens the drama but isn't true to the book at all, Sam is the unwavering cliff that carries Frodo through it all. Other movies, well sometimes I suspect the director has barely read a slashdot summary's worth of the content. A successful movie that you want to make a movie of has a good plot. Sometimes you have to make hard choices on what's vital and not but you don't just scrap the basics and make a completely different story set in the same universe. Jackson strayed a few times but most of the time he made it fit.
In movies you can say a lot with a few scenes, like the one with Arwen's future as there's burials and statues while she lingers on. Other times nothing is said at all like with the Elven struggles against the evil. If he hadn't put them at Helm's Deep, the Elves would be nothing more than the guys running away. At the best of times, you manage to give something to both - like in the scene with the soup where the LotR-fans gets to hear that he's a decendant of Numenor blessed with long life, while the regulars have a have a silly romantic scene as he avoids eating the yucky soup. A movie that's only great if you've read the book isn't a very good movie at all.
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