Watchmen image via Warner Bros.
Earlier this week, 20th Century Fox sued Warner Bros. over who has the rights to make and release the Watchmen movie, based on the acclaimed (some say overacclaimed) graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. icv2 has the details:
“According to Fox the studio acquired all movie rights to the Watchmen property between 1986 and 1990. Though it did assign some rights to producer Lawrence Gordon’s Largo International, Fox claims that it kept the right to distribute any Watchmen movie. When Largo folded, the agreement between Fox and Gordon was amended with a number of conditions, but according to Fox, Gordon was supposed to pay the studio a buy-out fee if he decided to make the film elsewhere—and Fox claims that it has never received any such fee.”
Fox requested an injunction against Warner’s ongoing production, currently being shot by Zack Snyder (300). Meanwhile, J.R.R. Tolkien‘s estate is suing New Line Cinema over the money the Tolkien Trust (which is co-managed by HarperCollins) was supposed to collect from the gross receipts on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. “The lawsuit seeks $150 million in compensatory damages,” icv2 reports, along with “the termination of any further rights that New Line might have to other Tolkien work,” including a two-film Hobbit project in pre-production. The article further states the Trust is contractually due 7.5 percent of the LotR trilogy’s gross profits, which were somewhere on the north side of $6 billion. But, comments entertainment attorney Ezra Doner in a separate statement, “The question in a case like this is not how much did the films gross, but rather how much did New Line and its affiliates receive. In many cases, box office receipts only indirectly relate to what New Line received.” (Doner also notes, drily, that many of the accounting practices the Trust is complaining about in New Line’s handling of the situation are standard practice in Hollywood studios, including… 20th Century Fox, a corporate cousin to HarperCollins.)