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Legal Fight Still Looms As 'Watchmen' Date Set

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By JOHN HORN

Los Angeles Times

Published: November 20, 2008

HOLLYWOOD - The iconic image from "Watchmen," Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' groundbreaking graphic novel, is a yellow button sporting the familiar happy-face design. Next to the cheerful smile, though, you'll find a foreboding splatter of blood.

That good-news-bad-news contrast fits the high-stakes legal tussle surrounding the movie version of the novel - a film that holds great creative and financial promise but is being overshadowed by a bitter copyright-infringement lawsuit.

Directed by Zack Snyder and starring Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley, "Watchmen" is one of the spring's most anticipated releases. Fan interest exploded after Snyder showed his film's trailer at July's Comic-Con in San Diego. The sprawling Cold War-era drama about a band of masked crime fighters is scheduled to arrive in theaters March 6, almost two years to the day after Snyder's global blockbuster "300" premiered.

It's taken more than 20 years and numerous false starts to bring "Watchmen" this far. Forsaken film adaptations include versions from directors Terry Gilliam ("Brazil"), Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Ultimatum") and screenwriter David Hayter ("X-Men"), with countless script revisions along the way. Joaquin Phoenix once was considered for Crudup's starring role as Dr. Manhattan, the all-powerful but tortured soul at the center of the "Watchmen" story. Early screenplay costs and abandoned preproduction fees have totaled close to $10 million, and no fewer than four studios have worked on the movie over the decades, including 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal.

The film's long path to the screen factors prominently in the litigation.

Now, 20th Century Fox claims that no matter how many hands "Watchmen" has passed through, Fox controls the right to make or, at the very least, distribute the film, even though Warner Bros. is producing and distributing it.

As Fox sees it, Warner Bros. infringed on Fox's rights, and "Watchmen" producer Lawrence Gordon gave Warner Bros. rights he didn't possess. Warner Bros. says Fox's claim is baseless and, as one of its court filings says, "opportunistic" - a last-minute, backdoor attempt to cash in on another studio's potential hit.

In Warner Bros.' view, Fox repeatedly declined to exercise any purported rights to become involved in the film during its various incarnations over the years, and in an e-mail even bad-mouthed the script that Warner Bros. greenlighted. The "Watchmen" case dramatizes the complex dealmaking that surrounds many high-profile projects and underscores how movie studios have grown addicted to comic-book franchises. It's not just the box-office returns that are meaningful. A hit film of this sort can sell truckloads of DVDs, help launch a theme-park ride or generate millions in television sales. Fox, which has suffered through a demoralizing string of box-office flops this year, could desperately use such a movie. It felt its case against Warner Bros. was so strong that it had no choice but to take the matter to court.

"They are not just fighting over 'Watchmen,'" entertainment attorney Mel Avanzado, who is not involved in the litigation, said of the duel between Fox and Warner Bros. "They are also fighting over sequel rights. Whoever controls the franchise probably controls quite a bit."

As part of its legal strategy, Fox is trying to block "Watchmen's" theatrical release, claiming it would cause the studio irreparable harm. The case has been scheduled for trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in early January, but Fox and Warner Bros. are set to enter nonbinding mediation toward the end of this month.

So far, the parties have not participated in any settlement talks, evidence that the legal skirmish - just like the mysterious murders of key characters in "Watchmen" - could grow more brutal before it gets better.

When DC Comics began publishing Moore (the writer) and Gibbons' (the illustrator) 12-part series in 1986, "Watchmen" took the comic book from the domain of pop entertainment into the realm of literary fiction. The comics were combined into a graphic novel that won the prestigious science-fiction Hugo Award and was listed by Time magazine among the top 100 modern English-language novels.

While the visual style and interconnecting story lines of the "Watchmen" comics made them among the most cinematic comics of the era, the conventional wisdom was that the story was unfilmable.

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