The Four Color Media Monitor

According to Giant Freakin' Robot, the now elderly actor Warren Beatty has owned the rights to making movies out of the nearly century old comic strip for nearly 4 decades:

...there’s a truly bizarre story of comic book media rights that’s resulted in a 30-year multi-media standoff. Warren Beatty, the star of the 1990 Dick Tracy film, has owned the rights to the character since 1985, and he’s doing everything possible to hold onto them.

After acquiring the film and television rights, for $3 million, to Dick Tracy, the 1930s police detective comic strip about the yellow trenchcoat-clad detective going up against organized crime, Warren Beatty worked tirelessly to get a film produced. Unable to find a director, he decided to do it himself, which lit the fuse that eventually led to a feud with Disney, the studio bankrolling the production. Plans for a franchise went up in smoke as the budget kept getting higher and higher, but Beatty wasn’t going to give up.

A Lengthy Court Battle

In 2002, the original Dick Tracy rights holders, Tribune Media, tried to sue Beatty for the rights back. A few years later, Disney admitted that a sequel was never happening and gave up their share of the franchise back to Beatty. This occurred as the legal battle with Tribune was ongoing, finally reaching a conclusion in 2009, when Tribune Media went bankrupt, leading to Warren Beatty as the last man standing holding the media rights for the entire franchise.

Holding Onto The Rights When No One Is Looking

Despite winning in court, there was a restriction imposed by the judge, stating that Warren Beatty had to produce a Dick Tracy project once every few years. As recently as 2016, the star was talking about a sequel, but now, well into his 80s, it’s increasingly unlikely he’ll put on the trenchcoat and fedora ever again.

So instead, Beatty has produced micro-budget Dick Tracy television specials, typically featuring him appearing in character for interviews. These specials have aired late at night, when no one is watching, and are frequently scrubbed from YouTube, making them a bizarre oddity of avant-garde art from one of Hollywood’s living legends.

This definitely is surprising news, made all the more baffling since the film for its time was sufficiently successful with at least $145 million. Make what you will of Beatty, but I guess he's the kind of actor who's let his influence and status within Hollywood get the better of him, to the point where he grips onto the filming rights to a comic strip creation till the end of time, and won't let anybody else try it out, if at all. Not that I for one am clamouring for a sequel, since it's past a point now where Hollywood could be trusted to deliver a tasteful film, and even Beatty himself probably isn't reliable anymore.

And at nearly a century old now (it debuted in 1931, and should be 100 in about 7 years), maybe the time's come to retire the newspaper strip, if it's still running, rather than let it risk succumbing to more PC than it may already have.

Labels: comic strips, history, licensed products, msm propaganda