Roger Rabbit is heading home. No, not to ToonTown, but to his creator, novelist Gary K. Wolf.
The film rights to Wolf’s comic noir novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, the basis for the 1988 hot film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, have recently reverted back to the author, according to an interview Wolf gave with Roger Rabbit fan site ImNotBad.
“I now have back the rights to all my characters, all my books. I can, basically, do my own Roger Rabbit projects,” Wolf is quoted as saying.
In the interview, Wolf goes on to explain that he was able to reclaim the film rights to his iconic characters through the 35-Year Copyright Reversion Clause in the US Copyright Act of 1976. This allows authors to terminate copyright assignments and licenses granted after January 1, 1978, after 35 years.
“Thirty-five years after you have sold the rights to a book or [song], you could petition the Library of Congress and get those rights back,” Wolf explained. “[An attorney] said to me, ‘You could get your rights back from Disney.’ I said, ‘There’s no way that’s possible.'”
But Wolf turned out to be wrong. With Disney being described as “very accommodating,” the rights quietly reverted to Wolf last year.
Although the interview doesn’t give a reason for Disney’s accommodation, it is likely the company knew that they were not going to be exercising the rights by making another Roger Rabbit film. The studio had tried for years to produce a follow-up to the four-time Academy Award winning film, but could never get the project out of development.
The original Who Censored Roger Rabbit? novel was published in 1981. It differed in several key points from the eventual 1988 film, primarily in that in the book Roger was a comic strip actor who spoke in actual word balloons that manifested over his head. After the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Wolf would write three more Roger Rabbit books, that pretty much ignored the continuities of, though they took some ideas from, both the original novel and the film.
As to the future of Roger and pals, Wolf is not sitting idly by now that he has the rights to his creation back.
“The things that we are looking at now are movies based on my novels,” he says. “A lot of people have asked why didn’t we 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.”
