Buried Treasure: Should Studios be Allowed to Sit on Projects?

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, news has been spread around the Internet that has stopped the heart of fanboys and girls world wide: a judge has ruled that 20th Century Fox has the rights to Watchmen, not Warner Brothers. With legal dust still flying through the air, many are anxiously wondering how this decision will affect the film's early March release date. The case raises an interesting question: Should studios be allowed to buy the rights to material if they then sit on it and don't use it for years or even decades? Take the current Watchmen saga. According to the time line laid out by Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, Fox bought the rights to the graphic novel Watchmen starting in 1986. Over the years, it had sold some of the rights in complicated deals with various producers and studios, but never made a move to develop the project itself. Fast forward to 2006, when Warner Bros. bought the rights to the film from Larry Gordon, one of the earlier-mentioned producers with whom Fox had negotiated with. That leaves a twenty-year gap where Fox, if they completely win their case, theoretically could have dusted off the comic book and turned it into a movie. Twenty years with no hint of working on the project. Now Warner Bros. has come along and not only made the film, but made a film that looks to be raking in a good deal of money.

Legal issues of who owned what when aside, should Fox have a claim to something they ignored for two decades? Should any studio for that matter? On the one hand, there is something to be said for allowing material to gestate. Clint Eastwood bought the rights to Unforgiven years before he made it, and has said that the time allowed him to "age into" the role; one can only imagine that ruminating over a script for ten-plus years allowed Eastwood to fully flesh out his ideas into the Academy Award picture it became. In addition, technology has been gradually developing over time, making films possible that would have been difficult to pull off in the past. It's very possible that producers were stymied on how to make the effects-laden Watchmen in the early 1990s--special effects has grown considerably in the last two decades. But consider the other side of the coin. A studio can buy a book or a comic and keep it off the market until they decide they no longer want it. But what if a studio with better resources or more will-power comes along? Fox never made Watchmen, but now wants control of the movie after Warner Bros. finally stepped up to the task. After twenty years of no movement on the project, does Fox really deserve the rights they are demanding? It seems to me that options on property should be restricted to a finite period of, say, five-years; after-which, if the studio in question has not made definite steps towards developing the film, it forfeits its rights. That way, if another production company comes along and is interested in the material, they can have access to it.

Granted, this is an idyllic situation. Studios spend millions of dollars to acquire the rights to books and TV shows and expect that they will be able to use them whenever they have an inkling to do so. And there are ways for one company to purchase scripts from another company. But although Fox might have the more solid legal claim to Watchmen, Warner Bros. is still the one who put the effort forth to develop the movie. Surely they should be rewarded for taking the initiative to unearth this forgotten piece of work and to polish it into a respectable looking film?

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