Once upon a time, a fledging young wizard named from Northampton teamed up with a talented cartoonist from London to draw a famously meticulous funny book. They made an agreement with the publishing company to serialize their story across 12 issues. As the norm for the time, these comic book issues would be printed in a limited quantity and sold at newsstands around Britain and the US, and when they were gone, they were gone. Once the funny book went out of print, the rights to the content would revert back to those two original creators.
The good news is, that funny book was incredibly popular — so popular, in fact, that the published decided to re-print the issues that contained the story. And it remained so popular that they then re-published those issues as a singular book collection, what some might call a "graphic novel." That collected edition, too, has remained so popular that the publisher has continued to publish and re-print it, in various different formats across several decades — all of which have continued to be lapped up by the public. As such, the publisher retained the rights to that original funny book, which they then licensed off to a film adaptation, as well as a series of tedious and unnecessary comic book prequels, a (frankly fantastic) HBO sequel miniseries, a nauseatingly self-indulgent crossover with Superman and Batman — and, now, a completely redundant CGI animated movie adaptation. Also as such, the original creators have yet to regain the intellectual property rights they were all-but-guaranteed in the original contract, given the industry and legal precedents that had been established prior to the publishing of their game-changing funny book.
The bad news is, that funny book turned out to be so incredibly popular that the published never let it go out of print, which meant that the rights never reverted back to the creators, which meant that the publisher was free to contain extracting value from their surprising smash hit intellectual property, turning it into a mediocre film adaptation, as well as a series of tedious and unnecessary comic book prequels, a (frankly fantastic) HBO sequel miniseries, a nauseatingly self-indulgent crossover with Superman and Batman — and, now, a completely redundant CGI animated movie adaptation, as seen above.
The animated Watchmen: Chapter 1 will be available on DVD and Blu-Ray on August 27, 2024. I hope nobody tells the aforementioned wizard. You can watch the trailer above, though I've taken some small steps to improve it. Which is a shame, because Titus Welliver's voice work for Rorschach is, uhh, a choice.
