Intellectual property damage: 7 franchise outliers that gave Hollywood a copyright and a left
Either through I.P. theft, parody law, or old-fashioned public domain, these movies challenged conventional business sense and made trouble for rights holders
Film Features Rhys Frake
We live in a world dominated by intellectual property. Save for Oppenheimer and The Sound Of Freedom, last year’s 10 highest-grossing movies released domestically were all sequels, remakes, or based on a preexisting franchise. Even Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and The Little Mermaid made the list, and this was a good year!
It’s no surprise studios have coveted known entities over original works. But that works the other way, too. Intellectual property in the wrong hands can do some real damage, muddying the marketplace generally ruled by showbiz fatcats. Sometimes, those wounds are self-inflicted, and others are a much-needed Molotov cocktail tossed by cinematic terrorists. Regardless of how or why these odd-ball projects that confuse and excite audiences came together, their existence remains the subject of endless fascination.
54 Comments
How exactly do you do an article like this and not mention that The Island just outright ripped off Parts: The Clonus Horror so much they had to pay the maker of the original terrible movie millions?
Also, didn’t the cheapie version of “Fantastic Four” involve J.D. Salinger’s kid? I thought it was illegal not to mention that when talking about it!
I think that was the 90s Captain America movie. If I recall, the star was Matt Salinger.
It’s kind of awful of me, but I was thinking after J.D. died, I was sure Matt would probably cash a good paycheck opening up his dad’s safe he kept the unpublished manuscripts in.
I believe you’re thinking of the 1990 version of Captain America, which was probably more expensive to make than the Corman FF, but was not nearly as good a movie.
I had no idea that Corman made a Fantastic Four movie. So are we saying that this intelectual property has been the subject of copyright shenanigans not once but twice? Strange, as the two official Fantastic Fours — if that’s the plural — were pretty terrible and made almost nothing at the box office.
I know that Matt Salinger played rubber-eared Captain America, in that early ‘90s turd.It’d be kind of great if he’d played both roles, though. It’d make for a fun little bit of movie trivia, having the same two Marvel characters being played by the same actor on two separate occasions (Salinger and Evans).
Because this is an article about movies that successfully skirted copyright issues, whereas the producers of “The Island” ended up having to pay a settlement.
Yeah, if we’re gonna go down that path, we’ve got Space Jail, those The Outer Limits episodes…
“Acknowledgment to the Works of Harlan Ellison” has gotta be the most passive aggressive credits in cinema history.
But if you win the Nobel, you’re given a free pass to rip off the hack idea of clones grown for their organs as Ishiguro did with his “Never Let Me Go”. The simple fact is, if you have the technology to clone whole people you have the tech to clone organs, and growing whole people, besides the ethical issues, is just economically wasteful.
Never Say Never Again also came out the same year that Octopussy, an official Bond movie. In fact, I believe that the Bond producers were planning to use Octopussy to introduce a new Bond (I’ve seen some audition footage of James Brolin trying out for the role); but then they must have learned of Never Say Never Again featuring O.G. Bond Sean Connery, freaked out, and brought back Roger Moore to keep from getting upstaged by an unofficial copy.
Is there anything Brolin can’t do?
The Bond slide’s text is such a word soup I can’t wrap my head around half of it
Written by AI maybe?
The copyright issue about Thunderball also meant that the producers couldn’t use (after the end of 1974 of a deal with Kevin McClory) any element introduced in Thunderball. And as both SPECTRE and Blofeld come from the script and the novel, that became a pain in the ass.They had deliberately eschewed SPECTRE in the first two Roger Moore outings (Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun), not to be too much repetitive. Albert Broccoli still assumed that he could use Blofeld once again for The Spy Who Loved Me, until he realized that McClory would have a field day in court. The villain was named Stromberg instead, with a few changes.Broccoli also did everything in his power to block the Thunderball remake. Kevin McClory got Sean Connery (who held a massive grudge against EON Productions and United Artists following a financial dispute) attached on, at least as a co-screenwriter in the seventies. There’s a script that circulates named Warhead that involved robotic sharks used to convey a nuclear bomb in New York through the sewers. They ultimately had to accept that they didn’t have much of a case to make something really original, and they stuck with the plot of Thunderball, but it caused EON Productions to give McClory the middle finger with the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only, where they dispensed of Blof…, of a “bald villain in a wheelchair” with a white Persian cat, in a comical scene.The rights dispute was also the reason for which the Bond films didn’t try for decades to have another recurring criminal organization to connect the films. The producers could have been sued, by a still very combative Kevin McClory, who died in 2006 after trying for twenty years to produce a second remake (starring Timothy Dalton, or Liam Neeson), even managing at some point to get Sony Pictures interested. By Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace, they found a workaround through Quantum, which was supposed to be as collegial and “democratic” as SPECTRE relied on a strict hierarchy. Then, Skyfall made so much money that they ultimately bought the missing rights for Thunderball from the McClory estate. And they ultimately decided to reintroduce Blofeld through something straight off Austin Powers in Goldmember…
The funny thing is is that NSNA is a much more watchable film than Thunderball, a movie Connery sleepwalks through.
Connery is by far one of the best things in Thunderball. He’s still very much engaged. Of course, he has doubles for the underwater scenes (they had at some points three different crews filming different sequences, to speed up production), but he’s great in it.Maybe you’re confusing Thunderball with You Only Live Twice. That’s the one in which he’s really on autopilot. He wasn’t on speaking terms with the producers after realizing how little he made from the franchise and being denied a raise in his contract, and shooting in Japan was a nightmare for him, as he was hounded by paparazzi all the time. There’s a ton of distant shots in this one, because, well, doubles.As some people have pointed, when he returned for Diamonds Are Forever, he was much more confident, in full movie star mode, even if he wasn’t in great physical shape, as some stills and outtakes show (I’m calling this one “No Time to Diet”). United Artists had agreed to pay him a fortune and to produce two pet projects with a Scottish cast and crew, while Saltzman and Broccoli had been sidelined, after making one film with George Lazenby and hiring John Gavin for the next one. As UA ultimately produced The Offence but not his Macbeth (due to Polanski making his own version in 1971), he didn’t take it well, he sided with Kevin McClory for NSNA (for which he worked out much more than for Diamonds Are Forever), and turned down any offer to be involved with the official Bond legacy, like extras on the DVDs, anniversaries, etc. He accepted an offer to voice Bond again in the From Russia with Love video game, but he wasn’t involved directly with EON Productions, and received his check from EA instead.
Never Say Never again is actually my favorite Bond movie, I just love how fun it is.
“I jusht remembered: it’sh againsht Sherviche polichy for agentsh to give out endorshementsh-”“WRITE!”Fatima Blush, man. Crazy in the head…plus she has one of the single greatest cars in a Bond film ever:
I really like NSNA myself, but apparently among serious Bond fans that is the “wrong opinion”.
Two things .1 before he died Kevin Mclory was shopping around a third thunderbolt movie ( named Thunderball 2000 at one point ) .2. My dad , as a young apprentice carpenter did a lot of renovation work on Mclorys house back in the 70s and the two used to chat a lot. When Mclory found out my dad was going on holidays to Rone after the job was finished, he made sure my dad got a big bonus , so that he could see everything yhe city uad to offer. Not relevant to James Bond , but relevant to me .
McClory was very fond of Warhead as a title, and the working title for the third version, developed for Sony Pictures, was Warhead 2000 or Warhead 2000 AD. The whole idea of Spectre was extremely important into establishing the film franchise. In the books, Dr. No and From Russia with Love have villains from Smersh/the KGB. Putting together a secret criminal organization was a stroke of genius as it addressed one of the main flaws in the books. Britain played second fiddle next to America during the Cold War, and it made little sense for a British agent to save the world that often, while the cousins in the colonies were doing the heavy duty in real life. By putting together a small organization, that gets overlooked by the major powers, the later books and the early movies made slightly more sense as it took a “small” country such as the UK to notice and fight Spectre.I don’t think that it’s really possible anymore to have Blofeld as a threatening figure, as he’s already reached caricature levels. But if the writers for the next episodes manage to keep Spectre, but with a different person at the head, it could be interesting.And to think that all of the legal issues could have been prevented if Fleming had simply mentioned the contributors to the script in a note… Nobody even knows who came up with these particular ideas.
“7 franchise outliers that gave Hollywood a copyright and a left”Real talk, can someone parse this sentence for me?
I mean… yes, but the result is pretty disappointing. It’s a “right and a left” as in getting punched in the face repeatedly but replace “right” with “copyright”. Ha-ha-has abound, I guess.
Ah, an attempt was made at wordplay. Got it.
And there I was thinking it was some heretofore unknown Zoomer slang I needed to Google…
I literally tried looking up “and a left” on urban dictionary.
Wow — I never would have come up with that. I just read it as more AV Club gibberish and moved on.
I’m sorry, but that teacher who “accidentally” showed his class a movie with “Blood and Honey” in the title def did that shit on purpose lol
omg are you watching Series 17?series 16 is still the most unhinged thing ever.
No, but whatever he does it’s probably good he’s not around kids any more…
at least he didn’t accidentally shart on the kid. a Jackson Pollack to the face because you didn’t check the stall in a “Code Brown” situation would be a horrific way to lose a job as a teacher.
Save for Oppenheimer and The Sound Of Freedom, last year’s 10 highest-grossing movies released domestically were all sequels, remakes, or based on a preexisting franchise.I guess you’re applying the Academy Awards logic that Barbie was an adapted story?
surely it’s safe to call barbie a ‘preexisting franchise’
I mean that’s the thing, it was a property people were familiar with. They had the brand to sell it with.
I’m looking forward to the Kleenex movie!
With a lot of changes. You never get why the city of Lyon hated Barbie so.
“She Knows What She Did”–Lyon town motto
The Fantastic Four (1994) is actually a fun, comic-accurate movie. Yes, it’s cheap beyond belief, but it has the heart of the original comics and is the best Fantastic Four movie. At 90 minutes, it’s an easy, breezy watch and it deserves an official release by Marvel Studios.
I’m not sure if its the daydrinking or not, but half of this article is fucking imperceptible to me. The James Bond section is literal word salad.
There is only one good thing about Morbius was the internet gaslighting Sony into thinking the movie had an audience because of ‘It’s Morbin’ Time’ and released the film again only to watch the movie bomb a second time at the box office.
So if Sony doesn’t follow sound business sense and make the Turner D. Century not Spider-Man movie we all need I could theoretically make one and possibly not be sued in to oblivion??? Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Move over, Boomers! The Edwardian Age is upon us to tell us that they drank from the cistern, rode velocipedes (no helmets, of course), and travelled through time on a tandem bicycle with a modestly dressed mannequin on the back. The way things should be.
Boomers!Lilly gilders and layabouts, the whole lot of them.
Turner D. Parody!
Satire isn’t dead, it’s just taking a long nap.
Airplane! took a much more direct route to making their work fit the copyright laws.They bought the rights to “Zero Hour”, the movie that Airplane! is based off of. If you read/watch/listen to any of the director’s interviews regarding the filming process, they had a copy cued up on set and frequently used it for direct reference in creating/framing scenes.It’s probably technically more a remake than anything.
This is the first time i’ve seen someone mention that The Peoples Joker is a spoof movie, i’ve not paid it alot of attention, but the way people are acting it was like it was going to be a joaquin phoenix style joker movie
Wait a minute, I thought they “went woke and went broke”? You’re telling me they still had two woke movies in the top ten??? Perhaps they need to be MORE woke!
Ssurely the Marvel ‘Bootleg iniverse” deserves a mention here …I mean they’re short films , but if you wanted a “What if Venom was a ‘Man bites dog” style movie instead of a romcom” film, its got you covered.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shankar%27s_Bootleg_UniverseIf anyone was going to make an unhinged and unlicensed Joker movie , Shankar would do a pretty good job of it.
No mention of Operation Double 007? A film starring Neil Connery as MI6’s top agent’s… brother, Dr. Connery, in a spy caper. It also had Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny Max, Adolfo Celi as Largo Mr. Thai, Bernard Lee as M Commander Cunningham, and Daniela Bianchi as Tatiana Romanova Maya, the film’s Bond Connery Girl.It was pretty audacious. IIRC they had to change the title to Operation Kid Brother but aside from that it passed parody muster even though it wasn’t a comedy. They were careful not to use any Bond names or direct references, just the trappings and some of the actors.It wasn’t a half-assed effort, either, even though it wasn’t a good movie as such. Aside from the very Bond cast, Ennio Morricone did the score!
I just watched Jenny Nicholson’s take-down of Escape From Tomorrow, and holy shit, the way she tells it, The Room was the fucking The Godfather by comparison.