You can sleep easy tonight: Warren Beatty has successfully retained the film and television rights to Chester Gould’s iconic detective comic strip Dick Tracy, Deadline reports.
Beatty, of course, produced, directed and starred in the 1990 film version of the character. The Tribune Co. were looking to reclaim the rights, but it was ruled that a TV special where Beatty appeared in character as Tracy — one that has never been aired anywhere, I’m pretty sure — was sufficient for Beatty to hold on to the rights before deadline. What, if anything, Beatty has planned for Dick Tracy remains to be seen.
Here’s another wrinkle, a recent tweet by Powers and Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis: “im the biggest warren beatty fan in the world so its odd that he is keeping me and @oeming from doing the dick tracy strip we were offered”
(Side note: How cool were these ads? They were in the inside front cover of like every comic book for a month in 1990.)
March 25th, 2011 at 5:30 pm
very cool ads.
I’d love to see a new Dick Tracy anything, a revamped strip, new movie or TV show, animated, anything as long as it’s done well.
Could Bendis do it? Probably.
March 26th, 2011 at 10:39 am
How can Warren Beatty keep a new Dick Tracy comic book from happening? How does him owning the license to TV and Motion Pictures give him any power to control publishing, animation, toys, etc??
Man, whoever made that deal with him must’ve been asleep at the table.
March 26th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
The fact that he was able to keep the rights, just by filming an interview in the Dick Tracy hat with TCM awhile back, and supposedly working on some TV special that’s never seen the light of day, is ludicrous.
Beatty is, what, almost 75 years old? He’s never going to play the part again himself, and I’m sure not what kind of demand there is for a new Dick Tracy movie regardless of who plays the part. The 1990 film didn’t exactly blow audiences away.
Unless Beatty’s looking to sell the rights, and the value of the property is questionable anyhow, what’s his reason for still wanting it?
March 26th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
I should also note that if that’s all it took for Beatty to keep the Dick Tracy rights, Marvel’s never going to get the movie rights to Spidey, Daredevil, FF, or X-Men back.
March 27th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
It sounds like Beatty was able to lock up all the ancillary rights — remember that whatever deal he made was made long before Batmania, when no one was giving much credence to the possibility of wringing a billion-dollar franchise out of a creaky old comic strip character.
I love the original. If this ruling leads to the director’s cut dvd there were murmurs about a few years ago coming out or even just a decent Blu-Ray release, I’m fine with it. That’s worth more to me than a new TV show or movie which, let’s face it, would probably be a disaster. The loss of new stories in comics form smarts way more.