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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 guess we have the answer to the question "who watches the Watchmen?"
Nobody.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
"Justice is coming to all of us no matter what we do."
Serves them all right.
Sig this!
... another film that ignores the meaning of the source work in favour of appeasing popcorn fifteen year olds.
Alan Moore goes about it the wrong way, but he's right. Hollywood needs to start coming up with its own ideas again.
I don't know how you can cram that entire graphic novel into a 2-hour movie.
By cutting a lot and releasing an extended version later that is 220 minutes long.
It's meta-humor.
I can easily imagine such an issue forming around something more important, such as a medicine or piece of life saving technology.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
there are no directors still living that are capable of capturing what actually makes this work a masterpiece.
How convenient: Your hypothesis cannot be tested because of copyright law.
I don't know how you can cram that entire graphic novel into a 2-hour movie.
Theres no way to keep 100% of it unchanged and uncut, but that's true of any media conversion. Many people seem to consider the original comic book form to be perfect, many of those people are going to be disappointed with the result no matter how good the movie is of it's own right. Some because they read the comics first, some because of a warped sense of elitism. That doesn't mean the movie is doomed to be worse than the comic books to an unbiased judge. It could be changed for the better.
Moore hasn't seen it and has said he will assume it to be trash regardless of public reception, critical acclaim or the decent of the almighty to induct the work into some sort of cosmic hall of cinematic excellence. Moore has been burned so badly in the past, he fears the flame to much to come into the light. He is hardly unbiased. Neither is Gibbons, who, as others have noted, has financial interest in the success of the film. Shit, I guess the only fair thing to do would be to see it and pass your own judgment.
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.
I don't know that "elitist" is necessarily the right word to use when describing people unhappy with a cinematic remake that in no way resembles the original material, but your point is still valid. I would argue based on that, however, that when a book has 1,000 pages and is well-received, then I'd posit that those 1,000 pages are there for a reason. There just isn't a way to do that justice in 120 minutes worth of film - even if a picture IS worth 1,000 words. There's simply too much content to convey. That's why I argue a mini-series with a good budget might be more appropriate for something like Watchmen. Yes, I know that Watchmen doesn't have 1,000 pages, but it's a pretty dense book nonetheless.
;)
All this arguing about it amounts to precisely nothing, however, as no one asked us to make the movie. We'll just have to wait and see what they can or can't do with it.
I downloaded all of the comics
And that's why your opinion is irrelevant. Please purchase a trade paperback version, support the creators of the original content, then try again.
Sorry to be harsh. I did the same thing. But after reading the electronic versions, I understood what all the fuss was about and went and got a paperback version so I could enjoy the writing and admire the artwork without sitting in front of a computer, and also so Moore and Gibbons received whatever royalties they still get from the sales of their original work. They deserve it.
I imagine someone will release this movie, eventually. Warner will pay off Fox, or hold their nose and come up with some kind of royalties deal. But the funny thing is, after reading the graphic novel three times now, I don't really care if I see the movie or not. I know it will look cool, and the story might even be OK crammed into two-and-a-half hours, but the graphic novel will always be superior because it was never about plot.
SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!!!!
The ridiculous ending makes that clear. Even the characters can't believe it actually happens. The book, at its core, is about different kinds of characters and how they cope with the ugly world around them. The character development which happens in the book will never translate well to movie format.
So, sorry to flame you, but please, if you haven't already, go buy a copy of Watchmen and support the original creators. Otherwise it's like not voting and then complaining about the government. You know, like half of North America does.
The notion that Fox owns the copyright to Watchmen is utterly absurd (and presumably just incompetent reporting). The comics series was produced by Moore and Gibbons under contract with DC Comics, a subsidiary of Time Warner, and (rightly or wrongly) that company owns the copyright. Fox might hold an exclusive license to the movie rights to the material, but that's a very different question.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
It's pretty inconceivable, though. Watchmen isn't an adventure story like LotR. It's really an exploration of characters and ideas set in the form of a murder mystery within the milieu of American comic-book superheroes. Breaking it into two or more movies would be highly unsatisfying. It might be possible to break it at the point at which [characters] decide to help [character] escape from [place], but most of the "action" up until that point takes place in flashbacks! The audience would be left looking forward to the big climax, sure -- but they'd mostly feel puzzled and ripped off, because the entire setup of the movie was the mystery of who killed [character] and they never found out who. In fact, they would barely have even been offered a suspect by that point.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As Quint pointed out on Ain't It Cool News, Fox waited till Warner Brother's practically had the film released before they bothered to excercise their copyright on the film, suggesting it might be an attempt to scoop up the cash on a blockbuster they wouldn't have to pay for.
Full article here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39578
This sig is false.
Fox might hold an exclusive license to the movie rights to the material, but that's a very different question.
If you actually bothered to RTFA carefully, you'd see that they have been ruled to have a copyright interest.
Since you're clearly ignorant on the matter and think "copyright interest" means "copyright" or "exclusive movie rights", try educating yourself instead.
I know it comes as a shock to all you fifteen year olds, but IP law is simpler than "Cory Doctorow says I can give my stuff away and copyright is bad!"
Please help metamoderate.
You have to be joking.
The only thing Hollywood does is create material that can be incredibly easily copied, and copyright and the laws that surround it are all that allows them to earn anything whatsoever.
Without copyright, film releases would look like this:
1) Film company pours tons of money and time into creating a movie.
2) Movie gets leaked before it's even released.
3) Everyone can grab a perfect copy of it from anywhere they want to.
Or, alternatively:
1) Film companies stop making movies because there's no way for them to make their investment back, an incredibly large amount of people lose their jobs, and one of the major exports from the US disappears.
If films weren't copyrightable, the entire industry would come crashing down, along with a decent chunk of the US economy.
Copyright laws are abused a lot, but they do not, as you say, hurt everyone. The situation without them would be much worse.
The reason 'I-just-made-him-up-man' doesn't generally show up in the box office is simply because there's no anticipated built in audience.
Even though Hancock was somewhat of a Zzzz movie for me, it managed to make $600m worldwide.. So it's not unprecedented.
Although, really what it comes down to is that good film ideas don't make it to the surface often in Hollywood. Regardless of the great ideas that may get bandied about on a daily basis, all you have to do is consider that they made _3_ movies in the http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107438/ 'Look who's talking' series.
_3_
Sit and think about that for a second.
_3_.
__ 3 __
And yet, we still have yet to see Goonies _2_.
fuck Hollywood.
fuck them up their 'Lets bring Michael Knight back' asses.
They did the Watchmen movie for the simple reason that 'gritty' comic book movies were proven hot by Sin City and 300. Look on IMDB, Sin City 2 is in pre-production and Sin City 3 is in planning. They're already planning "300-2" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1253863/.. Are you kidding me?
Hollywood finds one single good idea and then spreads it as thin as possible until we are revolted by the idea of _another_ film in the series coming out. Then they find a new idea. Then in 10-20 years it becomes retro and cool again and a new generation of dummies will line up for the rehashed garbage that the latest generation of sub-retarded writers belch out in-between the projects they _really_ care about..
It will be called "301 Spartans" where the lovable gaggle of Spartans must win out against the evil Persian Queen Cruella Divan.