Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Not only no, but hell no. For one thing, 18 months is too soon for a film based off it but even ignoring that, you're going to spend your life savings and lose.
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I agree with DF on 18 months. On the other front, however, we have some existence proofs of authors successfully defending their copyright in exactly this situation.
A. E. van Vogt won his plagiarism case against the folks who made the various
Aliens films. The screenwriters blatantly ripped off one of his finest novellas (written sometime in the 1940s, I think) for major major aspects of the first film. The damages he won in the lawsuit made him quite a wealthy man late in his life.
IIRC*, he wound up with a modest percentage of gross from the first movie (on ALL aspects: exhibition, licensing, DVD, foreign revenues, the whole enchilada), and about 1/3 of that on any sequels. It worked out to more money than any of the various individual creative types (think actors, director, producer, etc.) made out of the films. Buckets of money.
Xenophon
*I may not be recalling the specifics correctly. What I do know for sure is that the net to van Vogt was very large indeed. It was many times more than the inflation-adjusted sum total of his prior lifetime earnings as an author -- and he supported himself and his family on his writing for more than 40 years.