Rabbit Beats Mouse As Gary K Wolf Gets His Roger Rabbit Rights Back

Posted in: Comics, Disney, Marvel Comics, Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: Gary Wolf, roger rabbit

Rabbit Beats Mouse as Gary K Wolf gets his Who Framed Roger Rabbit rights back

Article Summary
Gary K. Wolf regains rights to Roger Rabbit from Disney using the 35-Year Copyright Reversion Clause
New Roger Rabbit sequel and live-action Jessica Rabbit movie are in development by original creator
Wolf was able to reclaim his rights more smoothly than creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Future projects may adapt Wolf’s original novels, including elements like speech balloons from the book

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Gary K. Wolf has announced on the I’m Not Bad podcast that he has regained the rights to Roger Rabbit from Disney and is currently working on a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a live-action movie featuring Jessica Rabbit. This is down to Wolf exercising the 35-Year Copyright Reversion Clause, designed to give original creators the ability to reclaim rights to their original work after that period. It’s the kind of case that Disney settled with Jack Kirby’s estate over for $30-$35 million, with Larry Lieber and the estates of Don Heck, Gene Colan, and Don Rico, and finally with Steve Ditko’s estate for undisclosed sums.

Gary K. Wolf’s 1981 novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, was set in the world of newspaper strips in which Roger is a sidekick in the Baby Herman strip and hires private detective Eddie Valiant to investigate why his employers, the DeGreasy Brothers, have reneged on their promise to give Roger his own strip. Roger is then murdered, and Valiant investigates the murders with a doppelganger of Roger. There were a lot of meta elements, such as using captions and speech balloons to fight with, which wer echoed in the re-envisioned Disney/Touchstone/Amblin movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in a world of cartoons, with Roger is framed for the murder of a Hollywood producer and the owner of Toontown, with his girlfriend Jessica Rabbit hiring Eddie Valiant to clear his name.

As the original novel author, Wolf retained all story rights related to the characters and was allowed to write new novels featuring them, but Disney and Amblin Entertainment owned the IP for any new films or TV shows. He has written Who Wacked Roger Rabbit, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?, Jessica Rabbit: Xerious Business and The Road To Toontown, all of which with different takes on the original novel and film in terms of continuity. Marvel Comics also published a graphic novel adaptation, a graphic novel sequel, The Resurrection Of Doom and then a comic book series carrying the movie story forward. But not for quite some time.

Wolf says “Any sequels that we do have to at least match the quality of the original movie. In production value, in tone, in script content, in empathy, in character development. It has to be as good, or better than, what we did before. That’s what the fans want, and I have promised the fans that’s what I’m going to give them.”

The rights reverted around a year ago, and it seemed to go a lot smoother for Wolf than for comic book creators. “I expected that this would be a contentious process. Who knows what was going to happen? But, it was not. It was very civil, very courteous, very straightforward. Disney was always top-notch for me. They treated me very well. They always accommodated me in whatever I wanted to do. The things that we are looking at now are movies based on my novels, which I now have the rights to again. A lot of people have asked why we didn’t do the first movie more closely to the Who Censored Roger Rabbit book, with the word balloons and those kinds of characters. Well, that’s on the table. The one that is most prominent … is a live-action Jessica Rabbit movie based on the book Jessica Rabbit: XERIOUS Business. That was the first project that we took a look at and the first we started developing. It’s probably the one that’s furthest along right now.”

Roger Rabbit returning to the big or small screen? Hey, how about another comic book while we are at it, Gary…? It’s closer to the original concept for a start…

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