All I see is a ton of nerd rampage and conjecture on the internet about how “FOX WANTS 2 BAN WATCHMEN SO IT WOANT INTOURFERE WITH THE RELEASE OF WOLVARINE!!!1111”
Apparently Fox is claiming that they own the rights to Watchmen and WB doesn’t, but WB disagrees? What on earth is going on? How could a huge studio make a huge movie and not realize that they don’t actually have the rights to it?
I read an excellent write up on it HERE
THe comments of the blog post even have a little background on the type of rights involved.
This will explain it nicely.
A few studios had Watchmen in development for years. As the comic got passed around, the lawyers have to be very careful about the ‘rights’. Fox is claiming that when they sold it, they retained some rights but Warner’s disagrees.
They may fight it out in court, they may make a deal.
The fact that the movie looks good and has good buzz has a lot to do with the motivation.
But hey, that’s show business.
They’ll cut a deal. There’s too much money involved for them not to. FOX will get a piece of the action, the lawyers will get hundreds of billable hours, and we’ll get the movie. Win-win-win.
I assume this will be the case as well. It’s like the Hobbit. Movies as profitable as these will be released and tons of people will make money.
In fact, they end up having to spread the money around so much, it can even cause the original studio to go out of business.