News, Etc.

Lawsuits! Lawsuits! Lawsuits!

Did the lull in production during the Writers strike drive people to boredom that they had to look for lawsuits to entertain themselves? It seems like it’s an overly litigious week. Here’s the rundown:

1) Screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald is suing Mel Gibson over his small writing fee on The Passion of the Christ that Benedict claims he was tricked into accepting, not anticipating that the film would become such a monster hit. Allegedly, Gibson told Fitzgerald that the movie would only cost around 7 million, so he took a smaller fee. The film ended up costing in the 25 million. Although, entering into a lawsuit against Gibson, we hope Fitzgerald manages to keep his sanity.

2) J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate, known as the Tolkien estate, and the HarperCollins publishing company are both suing New Line Cinema for $150 million. The two entities claim New Line hasn’t paid them their gross participation payments yet. Worse, the companies are also suing to stop New Line from possibly making the Hobbit prequel movies. The Trust and HarperCollins must have decided to gang up on the studio once they recently settled with Peter Jackson over his payments. Another dude, producer Saul Zaentz who used to hold Tolkien’s movie rights, is also trying to sue New Line over his profit participation. And the  common complaint brought by all those suing New Line: the company won’t let anybody conduct an audit over how much the Lord of the Rings trilogy has made. Man, they must be doing some funky accounting if they’re so afraid of these audits.

3) 20th Century Fox is suing Warner Bros. over the rights to the Watchmen movie, which is currently being directed by Zach Snyder and is adapted from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The facts behind the lawsuit are ungodly complicated with a long trail of Fox previously holding rights to the comic, but then giving it to another entity that then disbanded so the rights went to some other dude who didn’t properly buy out the rights before giving those rights to Warners. Or something ridiculous like that. The irony of it all, though? Warner Bros. owns DC Comics, which originally published Watchmen. Why did they let Fox buy the rights in the first place?

© 2008 Cinema Snark.