Well, folks, you can put away your pitchforks and torches and tell the villagers to call off their midnight march on Castle Fox-enstein.  The legal issues surrounding just which studio has the rights to release the Watchmen movie have been resolved, and the hotly-anticipated film adaptation of the seminal Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons graphic novel is back on for its March release.

As previously reported here and elsewhere, last month Fox managed to convince a federal judge, one Gary Feiss, that they still had the legal right to distribute any film based on Watchmen, a vestigial remnant of a failed attempt to adapt the story for the screen (one of many such attempts that’ve been made over the past two decades).  This, of course, presented a major problem considering that Warner Bros. had an all-but-complete blockbuster ready to roll into the nation’s multiplexes, and for a few scary weeks it seemed to be a very real possibility that, despite a major marketing push, this movie might not ever see the light of day after all.

Luckily, such a doomsday scenario won’t be playing out.  Under the terms of the deal, Warner will retain their distribution rights to Watchmen, including having the film released under their banner, but Fox will get a percentage of all Warner profits made from the film, including any tie-in merchandising and sequel options going forward.  (The thought of a Watchmen sequel is, frankly, mind-boggling.  However, this being the legal realm, the possibility had to be put in writing.)   In return, Warner will have to fork over an undisclosed amount of moolah to Fox, likely to recoup their legal fees and development costs of their own failed Watchmen project.  The exact details of the settlement have not been made public, as usually seems to be the case in these matters, and it’s likely both sides have a gag order on the subject.

The official statement will be made by Judge Feiss at 9:30 AM Pacific time (1730 GMT) today, 16 January, at which time more details are likely to be known.

I’m not surprised both sides chose to settle on this; there was far too much money being left on the table for that to allow Watchmen to languish indefinitely while both sides wrangled over the detail of who had the rights to what and when.  Now, all we can hope for is that Watchmen lives up to its billing, and keep our fingers crossed that this doesn’t turn into another V for Vendetta catastrophe…

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