'Watchmen' lawsuit roils Hollywood

'Watchmen' lawsuit roils Hollywood
Aug 18, 2008, 08:23 PM | by Josh Rottenberg

Last year, Warner Bros. rolled film on Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s $100 million adaptation of a comic book widely hailed as the greatest superhero story ever created. But did the studio even have the right to make the movie at all?

Earlier this year, Twentieth Century Fox filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. seeking to stop Watchmen’s release (scheduled for March 6, 2009), claiming that it, not Warner Bros., held the distribution rights to any motion picture made from the material. Today, a judge declined Warner Bros.’ request to dismiss the lawsuit, setting the stage for a possibly ugly legal tussle.

The judge’s ruling comes as a shock to many in Hollywood, as most assumed Fox’s claim had no merit. After all, the central figure in this complicated saga is Larry Gordon (Die Hard, Field of Dreams), a veteran producer who surely must have known what he was doing when he began trying to bring Watchmen to the screen 17 years ago—a storied struggle that took him to at least three separate studios (Paramount was close to making the film in 2005 before a regime change put it in turnaround) until finally finding a seemingly happy ending at Warner Bros. Yet according to Fox’s lawsuit, Gordon has a standing agreement dating back to the early '90s to buy out the studio’s interest in the project if he ever got it up and going at another company.

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