So says Dan Jinks, the producer of American Beauty, to the Vulture blog. Whereas the mantra of movie and, to a lesser extent, TV producers over the last several years has been licensing licensing licensing -- the bigger the property, like Twilight, Harry Potter, Iron Man, and Batman, the better -- a new slate of upcoming films and television shows reveal that Hollywood is turning back to the (free) classics for inspiration.
Take the rash of recent in-production or announced projects featuring Sherlock Holmes, Snow White, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Frankenstein, Greek Mythology, the Oz books, and on and on...Even Dreamworks has a new animated movie, Rise of the Guardians, slated for 2012 that features "a public domain Avengers if there ever was" -- The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Sandman (yes, the basic idea of a "sandman" is apparently public domain, though I wonder what the trademark issues are w/DC Entertainment).
Certainly, there will always be movies based on Spider-Man and the latest Stephen King novel. But what about smaller, quirkier projects on the level of Locke and Key, even Wonder Woman? Instead of Wonder Woman, couldn't movie studios turn to another Diana -- Artemis of Greek mythology? Instead of another vampire franchise based on a series of novels, why not revisit Dracula? And hey, is Gladiator, that science-fiction tale by Philip Wylie which was one of the main inspirations for Superman, in public domain yet?
I figure this:
ReplyDeleteWarner Bros. is part of the Time Warner conglomerate (also housing DC Comics, Hanna Barbera, and Time4Media). Disney owns Marvel, ABC, ESPN, the Muppets, the Disney themeparks, and Hyperion Press. Universal is partially owned by both Comcast and GE, and is part of the same corporate family as NBC and related cable networks, like USA, SyFy, Cloo, Chiller, etc. Fox is part of News Corp (which also owns HarperCollins). Most of these conglomerates also owns one (or more) publishing groups, which, in turn, run several smaller publishers.
Given this, I'd argue that taking public domain titles and updating them into new work (or, as I like to think of it, the "Roger Corman/Vincent Price Maneuver") is more of a fad than anything else. They'll continue to mine their own intellectual property until they get to stuff that pretty much NO ONE wants to see (though, the vast amount of intellectual property currently owned by said companies will give them a hell of a long time until that becomes an issue).
Of course, not taking chances on new things now pretty much ensures that they'll have a lot less to stuff to reboot in the future (unless, of course, they intend to make several versions of everything).