No ‘Watchmen’ until 2010?

The legal debate over who owns the rights to Watchmen just gets worse and worse. Word from Cinematical is that Fox is pushing for a June court date, while Warner Brothers is hoping for April.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter now says the trial has been set for January 6th, 2009. The rest of this article still has some bearing if the case doesn’t come to a resolution in a timely manner.

Umm, hello? The movie it set to release on March 6th, 2009!

Obviously if this giant scuffle isn’t resolved by the intended release date, it’s doubtful we’ll see it in theaters this March. And with the length that most trials go these days, and if Fox gets their wish, could it be the summer of 2010 before this movie actually is seen by the general public?

If all of this mess seems confusing, Vic over at ScreenRant.com has a detailed explanation of what took place over the years to get us to this point. It all involves a “turnaround”, which is sort of the way studios lease or sell their rights to a movie. From Vic:

It seems that Lawrence Gordon gave Warner Bros. the go-ahead to shoot the film. WB figures he owns the turnaround rights, so they’re golden (of course this doesn’t explain why they didn’t do some due diligence on the situation with a crack team of lawyers).

Gordon didn’t cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the Fox side of things, and assigned rights to WB incorrectly or incompletely in regards to his agreement with Fox.

Now Fox is taking Warner Bros to court, and it looks like the date may be as late as June 2009 (three months after the target release date for the film).

Either way, my anticipation for this movie is starting to wane. If it ends up being a year and a half (or longer) until we ever get to see it, they are going to have to seriously re-create some of the Comic-Con magic they had on their side this year.