No More R-Rated Comic Movies?

Splash Page is reporting an interesting rumor: Warner Bros. may be backing away from R-Rated comic movies after the intake for Watchmen was less than they had hoped. The unnamed inside studio source sites the recent over-whelming success of The Dark Knight and Iron Man, both of which were PG-13, as strong factors in Warner Bros. supposed decision to back off darker films in favor of more "family friendly" fare.

This is a move that on the surface makes sense financially. PG-13 films have a wider audience, as parents are often willing to take their kids to see "harmless" superhero violence. But the use of The Dark Knight as a reason to back away from R-rated material is a questionable defense. The Dark Knight was a film that pushed the envelope for violence in a PG-13 film, and it is the opinion of some, including myself, that the film should have been rated R. The film was a top at the box office long enough for word of mouth of its violence to drive away customers, but people kept on coming for first and second showings, until the film finally topped $1 billion dollars in world-wide box office receipts. If Knight had actually received an R-rating, would the success have been the same? I think so.
The critical acclaim combined with the hype created a monstrous wave of consumers that just couldn't be stopped, and I don't think that an R-rating would have catastrophically affected those numbers.

So what, then, about Watchmen, a comic book film that did receive an R-rating, and despite months of hype, including the public struggle of Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox over the rights to the property, failed to gross more than $56 million (domestic) in its opening weekend. To compare, PG-13 Iron Man raked in over $98 million in its first weekend. But there are more factors at work here than simply the film's rating. First, reviews were all over the place, from calling it a plot where "you really don't care" about how it ends to praising it as a film of "psychological sophistication." Compared to overwhelming praise for The Dark Knight, this is not the word of mouth that is geared towards roping in an audience, especially, as Slash Film points out, with the economy as tight as it is right now.

Now add in the fact that the film opened in March, as opposed to May, the kick-off month to the summer blockbuster season, which is usually a track to guaranteed success. Releases dates can make or break a movie. Prince Caspian, which opened in May 2008, while still earning a considerable amount of revenue, didn't hit the numbers Disney was hoping. There's a good deal of analysis that suggests that the film should have been slated for a December release, as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was, instead of sitting in between the two heavy weights of Iron Man and Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In a similar way, maybe Watchmen should have waited for the summer season for its release, when more people are on vacation and looking for a movie to spend their money on.

Quite simply, though, Watchmen was not a true superhero movie. The focus was on the politics, not the crime-fighting, a fact that probably deterred a substantial chunk of potential audience members. That, combined with the above factors, worked against the film to give it the weak turn-out it received. Does this mean that studios should stay away from R-rated superhero movies? Not necessarily. It more likely means that Watchmen should have been more solidly written and filmed before it was ready to join the league of superheros who have come before it.

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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