The "Bond problem" highlights an issue with what was once seen as Hollywood’s greatest asset – its back catalogue.
The "Bond problem" highlights an issue with what was once seen as Hollywood’s greatest asset – its back catalogue.
Franchises and reboots have been propping up Hollywood for years. But what happens when they lose the rights to these cash cows?
If anyone’s job in Hollywood should be replaced by AI, it should be the people running the studios, actor-writer Joel Kim Booster argued during the 2023 actors and writers’ strikes. Booster’s point was fair – AI is a statistical prediction machine. It looks at everything that’s happened and chooses the most likely next thing. For ChatGPT, that’s words. For Hollywood, it’s sequels.
2024 was the year of the sequel. According to data from industry website Box Office Mojo, the number of reboots, remakes, sequels, spin-offs and prequels in the global top 20 box office have multiplied by 800% since 1993. Back then, two films – Sister Act 2 and The Fugitive – weren’t original stories. In 2024, just two films in the global top 20 weren’t sequels, spin-offs or remakes – It Ends with Us and The Wild Robot, although both were book adaptations.
The box office for 2024 was also down on 2023 when Barbie and Oppenheimer were critical and commercial hits. The 2025 year, meanwhile, is starting badly. According to Sean McNulty, writer for the Hollywood newsletter WakeUp, Hollywood’s had “six weekends, and five of them have been lacklustre to be kind, with only one new movie in six weekends opening to more than US$20 million ($35.13m). Or anywhere near US$20m really. Hollywood has run out of excuses. This year it isn’t a strike-affected volume problem. It’s mostly releasing movies that America is not excited to see.”
Perhaps that’s partly because while 26 of the major studio releases in 2024 were sequels, this year there are 36 – from Bridget Jones through Wicked to the Passion of the Christ… which has limited plot to play with. Right now, there’s a lot riding on the critically reviled Captain America: Brave New World to lift the mood; its US$192m opening weekend is a good start.
But reliance on superhero sequels is looking more precarious after a global rights lawsuit filed at the end of January threatened the release of this year’s eponymous Superman reboot. The ferocious West Coast copyright lawyer Marc Toberoff, who is also Elon Musk’s legal representative in the First Buddy’s bid to buy ChatGPT, has revived a long-running row between the estate of Superman co-creator Joseph Shuster and DC Comics and Warner Bros.
With writer Jerome Siegel, artist Shuster sold his rights to the character to DC Comics in 1938 for US$130 and he and his family have been fighting for a better deal pretty much ever since – bringing lawsuits in 1947, 1992, 2001, 2004, 2008 and 2012.
Toberoff, who has represented the family since 2001, has ended up acting for other freelance comic creators – including the likes of Jack Kirby, who co-created Captain America as well as the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Thor and Silver Surfer. He’s also represented the team behind estates of those behind Spider-Man, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Captain Marvel and Thor.
In this year’s Superman case, he claims that – as copyright law varies across the world – rulings in the US don’t apply to movies released globally. In Britain, Australia and Ireland, for instance, copyright law allows for the rights to revert to the creator’s estate 25 years after they die. In effect, Toberoff is trying to force the studios to renegotiate the copyright – or be unable to have a full global release. “This suit is not intended to deprive fans of their next Superman, but rather seeks just compensation for Joe Shuster’s fundamental contributions as the co-creator of Superman,” the lawyer said in a statement. (The Telegraph contacted Toberoff for comment, but he did not reply.)
Reliance on superhero sequels is looking more precarious after a global rights lawsuit threatened the release of this year’s eponymous Superman reboot.
“The movie is due for release in the [northern hemisphere] summer and the case is launched at the end of January, so the timing is not entirely coincidental,” one former Hollywood lawyer points out. “For the studio, there is a lot of pressure to get this done.”
“This will either go nowhere or there will be a settlement,” Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis predicts. “There’s only a limited life left on the original IP, the original version of the character would only be usable in niche circumstances, and it isn’t clear whether there would be an appetite for someone else to exploit it on a major scale. There are only a few companies that could make a Superman film of the standard that the public expects.”
But on a larger scale, the reliance on old ideas is an increasingly expensive, time-consuming and legally problematic business. The Planet of the Apes franchise stems from French author Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planete des Singes. He died 31 years ago in 1994, meaning his estate will have renegotiated the rights but, in certain parts of the world, there are less than 20 years left before the novel enters the public domain. In the case of J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, his works passed into public domain in Malaysia, Pakistan and New Zealand two years ago but in Britain the copyright stands for another 18 years.
Meanwhile, the movie rights to Lord of the Rings – currently held by New Line Cinema – were due to expire in 2023 as they hadn’t been exercised for some time (licensing deals often stipulate that rights revert to their original owner after a specified period lying dormant, which is why Sony makes Spider-Man movies so frequently to prevent Peter Parker returning to Marvel). But if you’ve managed to sit through Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, you’ll understand just how bad a fast-tracked film thrown out to retain dormant rights can be.
If you sat through Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, you know how bad a rushed film just to keep the rights can be. Photo / Universal Pictures
Even if Toberoff loses, Superman has less than 10 years before the character is in the public domain just like Tintin, Popeye, Buck Rogers, Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. And over the rest of the decade, Conan, Hercule Poirot, Laurel and Hardy and King Kong will also be available to all.
“The way that intellectual property has been commoditised means that you’re getting these old, very valuable works that are suddenly bumping up against the ends of their terms in various ways,” says Jack Browning, partner at a US media and entertainment law firm. “It’s a rolling, slow-moving avalanche. It’s going to be different in whatever jurisdiction you’re dealing with. James Bond’s Casino Royalegoes into the public domain in 2030 so that book is there, but the rest of Bond isn’t. [So] the aspects of his character which were derived from the book would be fair game. It gets very metaphysical.
“It’s going to create some interesting issues going forward as our culture is so reboot-oriented. Every producer’s nightmare is that there’s some piece of uncleared IP and there’s an injunction or something that disrupts the movie.”
The rights to the use of the Bond name and logo are already facing a challenge after Austrian property developer Josef Kleindienst filed an attempt to take over Eon and Amazon’s rights to the spy’s commercial trademark in the EU on January 27. While trademarks are forever, they’re only a licence to make a killing if used often enough. Kleindienst’s case, asking for the trademarking of James Bond Special Agent 007, James Bond 007, James Bond, James Bond: World of Espionage and the phrase “Bond, James Bond” for use in vehicles, video games, bars and restaurants to be cancelled, argues the next movie is years away so the trademarks won’t be used for more than five years.
Kleindienst claims his interest is in keeping Bond alive and preventing “the next film being the last”, according to a spokesperson. Kleindienst, meanwhile, is building a vast island lair called the Heart of Europe in Dubai which will allow him to control the World, where the World is a collection of artificial islands in the Persian Gulf arranged in the shape of a map of the world.
James Bond’s Casino Royale goes into the public domain in 2030.
The Bond problem highlights an issue with what was once seen as Hollywood’s greatest asset – its back catalogue. Amazon paid US$8.5 billion to acquire MGM in 2022 with the jewel in the franchise crown being James Bond. Yet No Time to Die took five years to develop, film and release, suggesting that given EON Productions still hasn’t cast the next Bond it may need to get a move on in case someone else beats the company to it when the Casino Royale rights expire in five years.
“It’s a phenomenon I think many business leaders knew was coming, but wanted to pretend wouldn’t really ever arrive,” says the Entertainment Strategy Guy, an anonymous Hollywood business blogger and former studio strategist. “In the past, the copyright kept getting extended, so folks assumed it would keep going too.” He says the box office for superhero movies in particular peaked in 2018/9 but that studios have no plans to dial back on milking this IP.
“I think we’ll see a combination of tactics,” he says. “A lot of companies will use trademark infringement instead of copyright. Trademark doesn’t have an expiration and is fuzzier. In other words, expect litigation to continue by big companies. A lot of the IP that is being leveraged has a few decades of life before it expires, and studios can keep leveraging that. Plus, they should continue to find new sources of IP and mine those.”
All of which leads to the question – why doesn’t Hollywood just come up with original ideas? If the old IP is losing audience and about to walk out the door, at what point does it become cheaper to invest in new ideas than defend old ones?
“Hollywood wants to make money,” says former Empire editor Ian Nathan. “Every film they make is a risk, so they try to limit that failure. If this worked in the past, it will work again. That’s why [Hollywood] repeats itself.”
Film publicity reflects these trend cycles, he says. “I think it was around 1994 that Empire shifted from featuring the actor on the cover to the film. It would still be the actor’s face but in costume in a picture shot and chosen by the studio.”
Nathan points to Jaws and Star Wars as beginning this movement, noting that George Lucas was trying to make Flash Gordon after he struggled to buy the rights – large sections of the first Star Wars film’s plot are almost identical to the 1950s TV series.
So is it worth holding on to old IP at the cost of developing new ideas? “Superman has made billions of dollars but it’s not going to keep making that sort of money,” one strategist pointed out. “But compare that to the take on this year’s Oscars – all the original ideas took less than US$100m, while Dune: Part Two and Wicked took over US$700m.”
“People go to the cinema less frequently,” Nathan says. “You could say that’s the fault of the films or the way we live. The only way to find out, to make big money from original ideas, is for studios to trust creative people and if there’s one thing studios hate, it’s creative people.”
