Writing Sequels/Buying Rights?

There's no way a studio would sell you franchise rights to established characters, unless they were long, long forgotten. And then it would be way more than you could afford.

You might be able to find the underlying rights, such as the original book or something, but even then it'll be thousands of dollars - depending. And you would have to make sure you didn't come close to the filmed version, so it wouldn't be recognizable as the same characters or plots.

However, you can easily write a spec script using those franchise characters, but you can only try to sell it to the studio that owns them. No one else would be allowed to produce it, or pay you money for it.

My advice would be to work with a producer or an agent who can untangle the legal wranglings.

ParsonBoyles said:

There's no way a studio would sell you franchise rights to established characters, unless they were long, long forgotten. And then it would be way more than you could afford.

You might be able to find the underlying rights, such as the original book or something, but even then it'll be thousands of dollars - depending. And you would have to make sure you didn't come close to the filmed version, so it wouldn't be recognizable as the same characters or plots.

However, you can easily write a spec script using those franchise characters, but you can only try to sell it to the studio that owns them. No one else would be allowed to produce it, or pay you money for it.

My advice would be to work with a producer or an agent who can untangle the legal wranglings.

Click to expand...

Just a single additional point.

In principle, you cannot even write something based on a property owned by somebody else and attempt to sell it to anybody -- not even the person who owns it.

If you tried to do that they might ignore you, or you might get a nasty letter from their legal department.

If you wanted to do it as a learning exercise and then put it in the back of your drawer, you could do that, but you can't try to sell it.

A working writer can do to a studio that owns a property and say, "Hey, I've got a great idea for the next Jurassic Park movie. I'd like to pitch it to you."

That you can do - *if* you are an established writer. That's because you are not violating anybody's rights by going in and discussing somthing that you *might* right if the rights holder thinks that it's a good idea and decides to pay you to do it.

What you can't do, legally, is just sit down and write it and then go in and try to get them to buy it.

Because they own the sequel rights that means that they control who gets to write the sequel, when it gets written and what gets to go in the sequel.

So the outlook for any non-pro who's thinking of writing a sequel or a remake of an existing property -- the outlook is exceedingly grim.

If it's at all a recent movie, the rights will almost certainly be unobtainably expensive.

Studios are hesitant to part with the rights even to old movies since they're looking back to their archives more and more as source material for re-makes.

If you write a sequel or remake without permission and attempt to sell it to anybody you shouldn't have any expectation that it will result in anything except a threatening letter from the legal counsel of whoever owns the rights to the underlying material.

NMS

Technically, you CAN write anything you want. You CAN write your sequel and as long as you ONLY use it as a sample and don't try to make money off it, you are free and clear.

And if you wanna do it, and get it out of your system, go for it.

However, AS a writing sample, it's worthless. If I'm a producer looking at your stuff, and I see you did a kickin' sequel to The Dark Knight, I'm not impressed, and really, I'm likely as not, gonna pass without even reading... or quit as soon as I hit the word GOTHAM, WAYNE MANOR, etc. in a Slug Line.

You need to show you can create your own characters. Your own world. You need to show what YOU can do from scratch.

My two cents, take the core concept of your sequel or option idea and build your own characters into it and change the world to something original.

Now I have absolutely NO EVIDENCE that this is the case, but I ALWAYS thought the movie SE7EN could have been a Batman movie. With very little reworking, you can take the grim faceless city and make it Gotham, you take Morgan Freeman's Cop and make him Batman, the loner, somewhat deadened by the crime he's seen and city he lives and works in, but a relentless pursuer of the criminals anyway. Brad Pitt as the new guy in town, maybe the recently transfered Detective Jim Gordon, or ADA Harvey Dent, or some new non-canon cop, who's ideal enough to look up to Batman and know that he will never be pulled down that way. And lastly you have the Criminal with a curious theme that seems insane but makes perfect sense in it's own twisted logic.

Like I said, I have no proof this is the case, but you can see via this (reversed) example, how you COULD change a franchise idea and make it something unique.

Hope this helps.

The guy who wrote Alien Vs. Predator wrote it on spec and sold it to the company that owned the rights. So it's possible. But it is really unlikely.

Die Hard 3 was actually a Lethal Weapon script (hence the introduction of the sidekick black guy). So there probably isn't any reason you can't adapt your script to being original. Scripts are re-purposed all the time.

Good luck either way.

And NMS certainly knows of what he speaks.

zeprosnepsid said:

The guy who wrote Alien Vs. Predator wrote it on spec and sold it to the company that owned the rights. So it's possible. But it is really unlikely.

Die Hard 3 was actually a Lethal Weapon script (hence the introduction of the sidekick black guy). So there probably isn't any reason you can't adapt your script to being original. Scripts are re-purposed all the time.

Good luck either way.

Click to expand...

If my understanding of this complicated story is correct (and at this point I'm relying strictly on memory so you'll have to take it with a grain of salt) the guy who wrote the original A vs. P script did write it on spec -- even though, at the time, there was already a A vs. P comic book that already existed and had been authorized by the rights holders.

He didn't actually sell it to the company that owned the rights. He sold it to some other company who though that *they* would be able to sell it to the studio.

The writer turned out to be wrong and the company that bought it from him turned out to be wrong.

The A vs. P script that was ultimately made has no relationship at all to that script.

It was both written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, the guy who did Resident Evil and the Mortal Kombat movies.

NMS

nmstevens said:

If my understanding of this complicated story is correct (and at this point I'm relying strictly on memory so you'll have to take it with a grain of salt) the guy who wrote the original A vs. P script did write it on spec -- even though, at the time, there was already a A vs. P comic book that already existed and had been authorized by the rights holders.

He didn't actually sell it to the company that owned the rights. He sold it to some other company who though that *they* would be able to sell it to the studio.

The writer turned out to be wrong and the company that bought it from him turned out to be wrong.

Click to expand...

Not quite.

It was Peter Briggs who write the script entirely on spec, and he did manage to sell it to the rights holder. He admitted it was totally luck - he just wanted a script that would generate a bit of buzz.

To quote:

When I handed it in to my agent, he looked horrified, because he had no idea I was writing it, and assumed rightly it'd be a tough sell. He said, "Well, I've got to go across to LA next week," and so he took it in to Larry Gordon... who had been asked the week before by Fox to come up with this! And bang, we were away.

It was a total, absolute fluke. You must remember, the first one I wrote, the one that leaked and is out there everywhere, I did as a writing sample - a "please give me some work" sample. I didn't expect people to take it seriously. And I wrote it very quickly. Joe Roth at Fox was the big champion of it, and he authorized the second draft, which was a tidy up, and I'm really happy with it. Some of the characters disappeared from it, a lot of the dialogue was re-worked, the beginning's different, some of the extra sequences are different... There's about 70% of my first draft remaining in the second.

Link to interview here.

Click to expand...

The dispute between Dark Horse & Fox seems to have come later ... at the time he was paid to do a re-write, it seems to have been a properly authorised script. (It may be even be that Paul Anderson used "I couldn't use that script" as an excuse at a Q & A .. a kinda 'don't blame me' when it had a fairly poor reception!)

I know that I'm going to lose any semblance of street-cred here ... but I didn't think that AvP was such a bad movie.

Mac