alt Hacker NewsSimilarly 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."""
The 1994 Fantastic 4 movie was the same deal. Produced for $1M, never released. I guess it's hard to make a legal standard for "actually trying" with a license, but it is really weird to see that you can keep these licenses alive with these zombie products.
Another less token one I'm aware of is the Marvel themed land of Universal Orlando. Universal has an indefinite license to the IP as long as they don't 'mishandle' it. An easy way to make it very clear that you haven't done that is to just never change anything. So all the rides, signage, etc is carefully maintained but identical to how it was 20 years ago.