‘Watchmen’ for the Arthouse: Lionsgate and Weinstein Sue Each Other Over ‘Push’

Lee Daniels and Sapphire at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival premiere of ‘Push.’ Photo by Eric Kohn.
It’s a bizarre situation, if not an entirely unfamiliar one: Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company are suing each other for rights on Lee Daniels’s Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, which I saw at Sundance last month and liked quite a bit. Lionsgate secured the rights a few weeks after Sundance, but it seems TWC believes it has a stake in the film as well—but just what kind of stake remains unclear, as does the company’s motives for not speaking up about this earlier. I’m hearing that they probably don’t have a shot at getting anything out of this.

Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Warner Brothers went through all the stages of production on Watchmen and nearly finished the movie before 20th Century Fox decided to claim it still owned the rights to the source material, Alan Moore’s graphic novel. Eventually, WB and Fox reached an amiable settlement, but WB didn’t really have a choice in the matter, since Fox clearly did have a basis to the claim. Push is also a highly anticipated adaptation, one that will also raise the voices of unsatisfied future audience if the fate of its distribution remains in peril. Both movies have pop culture forces enhancing their commercial appeal, although we’re talking about vastly different cultures here: Watchmen has Kevin Smith and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, among others, while Push will supposedly get boosted by support from Oprah and Tyler Perry.

The Watchmen debacle had the media dancing the jig of a good scandal story for months. Will Push yield the same result? And will its chances be hurt or helped by that zany sci-fi movie with Dakota Fanning that has the same title and hits theaters tomorrow? If only that was the biggest hurdle Daniels’s movie needed to traverse.

Here’s my Sundance review of Push for indieWIRE and an interview I conducted with Mo’Nique for Spout.

Update: Here’s Eugene Hernandez’s full report on the situation.

erichkohn posted on February 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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