Judge Rules Fox Has Copyright Claim To Watchmen 262
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.
Re:Pfft! Cut the baby in half! (Score:0, Interesting)
Exactly what I was thinking.
Fox would then scramble to make a deal with WB so that they could actually make money on it somehow.
Re:Another Alan Moore IP... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
horray! (Score:1, Interesting)
Hopefully this will allow the hollywood shitwigs to understand that copyright is not something for them to use at their leisure. It is a seriously flawed set of statutes that hurt everyone. I'm so glad they've finally been bitten by their own beast. Now maybe they will stop pouring so many dollars into making more draconian copyright laws that take rights away.
Enter paranoia mode (or not) (Score:2, Interesting)
The original comic had a lot of political content - without committing any real spoilers for the few who read this without actually having read the comic, the most central plotline of the whole miniseries involves using the 'big lie' technique to manipulate the masses. There are some '9/11' parallels to this. There's also some more tangential stuff. Sticking with just what's revealed early in the series and trying to avoid spoilers, Nixon stays in power for his second term because the approximate Superman equivalent hero intervenes in Vietnam, a somewhat Captain America like hero, complete with a patriotic red, white and blue costume, is increasingly revealed as a real bastard, and the prior generation of heroes includes at least one that sounds like he got his costume idea straight from a KKK meeting.
I'd gladly go into paranoid mode here and propose that this film's legal troubles might be from some people wanting to suppress the political criticism, but some of the rumors about what's still in and what's out make me wonder, is there actually anything left in it that involves even the tiniest bit of politically sensitive content? By some accounts, the only way the movie could make any comments the current administration might dislike would be by encouraging a few people to buy the graphic novel.
Re:Too Bad (Score:1, Interesting)
I guess you know more than the artist who drew the graphic novel, and has, you know, SEEN the movie:
Gibbons: I am feeling very optimistic about the film. I have been pleased with everything I have seen, and every successive thing I see makes me feel better.
Or maybe he hates it, but he gets a percentage of the gross, so he wants you to go and see this steaming turd of a movie, since he won't make any money otherwise.
I, for one, am disappointed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Too Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Too Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, its very accurate considering the parent poster put people who were fans of Watchmen before it was being made into a movie in a separate category. I've noticed some people, even if they have NEVER EVER read the original book/novel/graphic novel/comic book or what have you instantly rag on a movie version of the story. The only thing I too can think of is a "warped sense of elitism" in which their point of view is correct at all times and everyone else is a moron.
The previews, from someone who has never seen/read Watchmen, looked promising. It may be a live action "cliff notes" version of the novel, but I go to the theater to be entertained and out of the house, usually with friends. It could be a crappy conversion, but still a good movie.
Re:Too Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Enter paranoia mode (or not) (Score:3, Interesting)
When OJ Simpson was arrested for Nicole Simpson's murder, some believed that he was being framed by the government for his part in the movie Capricorn One, which was about a faked Mars landing--they thought it was revenge for obliquely revealing that the moon landing was a hoax.
If the Bush Administration wanted to suppress the movie, why wait until it's already filmed, gotten a lot of pre-release publicity, and has a lot of people excited about it? Why do it when the movie has sparked renewed interest in the comic book? Why not just tie it up in the development hell it's been in since the comic was first released?
Re:Too Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, if you could find the funding to make a really great non-recycled-horse-shit movie, how many people would ever get the chance to see it? There are a lot of great indie films but they don't get shown on every screen everywhere like the shit Hollywood churns out month after month and until society wises up and says fuck this, I want quality or I'm not going to spend my money anymore, nothing will change.
Then again, I like a lot of what Hollywood has been putting out lately. Vantage Point, Strangers, and Alphabet Murders are three movies I watched last night that I thought were decent.
Re:Another Alan Moore IP... (Score:2, Interesting)
A great storyline will not be able to support sub-par special effects, and vice versa.
As a visual effects professional I respectfully disagree, even though my livelihood depends on Hollywood wanting to put more and better effects in every blockbuster. The role of effects is to enhance the story. If the effect suck, well, they suck, but a great story will shine through no matter what...it doesn't need a visual orgy to endure.
This reminds me of the gameplay vs. graphics arguments in gaming. Crysis looks stunningly beautiful for a real-time engine...but I can sit down with many "ancient" games and enjoy a much better experience, visuals be damned.
Great effects with a sub-par story? You get Michael Bay...