UPDATE: No matter what happens with everything posted below it has now been revealed the hearing scheduled for yesterday, Tuesday the 13th, was canceled meaning a settlement could be just around the corner.
I considered opening this article saying how this Watchmen lawsuit was certainly helping raise the profile of the film. Then I remembered, no one cares except for us crazy movie nuts that actually read and write about movies day-after-day. What is wrong with us by the way?
Our problems aside, a new article at the Los Angeles Times tells us more and more fingers are pointing at the wallet of one Larry Gordon, the producer that has been at the center of this mess since day one:
The court fight over Watchmen is costing Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, but the biggest bill of all could fall to the film’s producer, Larry Gordon, his lawyers and their insurers, who could be on the hook for substantially more money.
Court documents in the nearly yearlong dispute over the superhero movie’s distribution rights show that Warner Bros., which is poised to lose valuable rights to Watchmen after a judge’s favorable ruling for Fox, is pursuing Gordon “for all damages Warner Bros. suffers as a result of Fox’s claims.”
Over recent days it has been talked about how settlement negotiations between Fox and Warner Bros. have been improving and the “Times” article goes on to say one of the “possible settlement terms under discussion is a deal in which Fox could end up with as much as 8.5% of Watchmen‘s gross receipts, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. To compare this to director Zack Snyder’s previous film, 300, which took in $456 million worldwide, that would be approximately $38,760,000. I don’t anticipate Watchmen managing to find the same audience 300 did, but to say the potential isn’t there would be naive.
Gordon recently sent a letter, that was ultimately ignored, to U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess and inside of it Gordon said the whole mess seemed to come about as the result of “a mutual mistake by both parties [Fox and Gordon], or a unilateral mistake made by his counsel, on which Mr. Gordon relied.” I can just imagine Fox winning money from Warner Bros., Warner Bros. suing Gordon and then Gordon suing whoever is left. My guess is we will see Watchmen in theaters on March 6, but I have no estimate on when this lawsuit will end.
The article then goes on to repeat everything that has gone on so far in the battle, you can get it all right here.
