I was listening to the radio and heard the reporter say that an author’s book had been ‘optioned’ for a film. How is that different than ‘buying the rights’ to a book in order to make a movie? Or is it essentially the same thing?
As I understand it, it’s sort of like when you offer to buy a house.
You put up some earnest money to get a contract and then you have an option to buy the house providing it meets all the inspections and appraisals and whatnot specified in the contract. If so, you actually buy the house.
With a movie, they buy an option to make the movie (maybe 10% of the rights fee), then try to get financing and everything to get a green light to make the movie. If they get greenlit, then they buy the rights.
The ‘option’ is a promise by the owners of the work that they won’t sell the movie rights to anyone else for a particular period of time, but the company buying the option also can’t make the movie yet.
Can the owners of the option resell that option and make a profit on it?
Yes. It’s done often. I think the contract sometimes disallows this, but it’s no advantage to the author, the owner of the option may never make the film, and the author makes nothing else.
Do these options typically expire at some point if the owner doesn’t buy the remaining rights? And if they expire what happens to the option money?
The option rights are bought for a specified period of time. The money is payment for that period time. That’s what options like this are. So the author keeps the money.
There have been cases of studios (e.g., Disney) buying the rights to a book in order to prevent someone else from making it into a movie and yet have no intention of doing it themselves. But those are straight rights, usually. Using an option to pull this stunt would only be used to prevent a similar movie from coming out when the studio has something similar to the book planned. Once the movie comes out, the option can expire and another studio would have doubts about making their version.
If the seller is smart, yes. One of the reasons they keep making Spiderman movies is that if they don’t the option will expire and Marvel gets it back, and they could make their own Spiderman movies. On the other hand JRR Tolkien sold the rights to LoTR way back in the late 60’s, and didn’t specify any expiration that I am aware of, so the rights continued to float around until Peter Jackson got New Line to buy them and make the movies.
Isaac Asimov sold an option to one of his stories to Orson Welles, but, not knowing how Hollywood works, didn’t set an expiration date, so the Welles estate still has the rights. Nowadays, most authors know better.
There are option rights and there are movie rights. The Marvel Spiderman rights are movie rights. Marvel is being paid in full. There is an expiration date on those rights, which is why we got pointless reboots of the series. (This is also why there was the justifiably forgotten Fantastic Four movie.)
Option rights are almost certainly time limited. And for a fairly short period of time. Movie rights didn’t use to be time limited very often but are increasingly so.
Repeat: Options rights don’t give the buyer the right to make the movie. They give them preference to later purchasing the full movie rights at a set cost or to match other offers.
A studio might option several books that are coming out, waiting to see which generate a lot of interest, and then move forward with full rights on a few when the dust settles. And even then, the chances of being made into a movie are small.