alt Hacker NewsSorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
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So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.
Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.
Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.
https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
Similarly Wheel of Time had one... I had to dig deep and converse with an LLM to figure it out. I proposed to it "copyslop" as the term of art, it came back with "placeholder productions", "copyright keepers", and eventually there seems to be a "real" term-of-art called "ashcan" - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9jxvtb/til_a...
In any case: """Yes, you're likely thinking of the "Wheel of Time" pilot episode titled Winter Dragon, which aired in 2015. It was a low-budget production that was released with almost no promotion and aired in the middle of the night on FXX. The purpose of this release was widely believed to be an attempt by Red Eagle Entertainment to retain the rights to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as their licensing agreement required them to produce something before a specific deadline."""
https://wheeloftime.fandom.com/wiki/Winter_Dragon