Monday, June 06, 2016

Cartoon Fight

Two movie companies duke it out over distribution rights for an animated feature.

A week after The Weinstein Company went after Open Road and the producers of the upcoming Playmobil movie over who actually has the right to distribute the animated pic, the other side hit back. ...

“There was never any contract with TWC,” says a cross-complaint (read it here) filed today by producers Moritz Borman and Dimitri Rassam and their respective companies in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“TWC launched this controversy, masking its current financial instability by filing a strike suit with no written license attached,” the eight-page filing claims, also calling the whole matter a case “about a failed movie license negotiation which cratered.” ...

The interesting part of this?

Forty years ago, No companies would be fighting over a cartoon. Nobody would care.

Some small-budget, animated trifle would get made, either domestically or overseas, and some podunk distribution company, working with fifty prints, would do a half-assed distribution. They would run matinees in medium-sized markets, make $722,000 (all in) and call it a day.

Major distributors would stay away in droves ... because nobody cared. It was ANIMATION. There was no money in it. (Except for Disney).

How times change.

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