Joel Siegel made it almost thirty years before he had to walk out of a movie. I barely made it two. Fortunately for me, that movie was a virtually direct to DVD movie, meaning I didn’t have to create a scene walking out of a theater. I just had to stop my DVD player and voice my opinion in my review (Go have a root canal, spend the evening with your mother in law, and then settle down for the night in a bed of rusty nails. It’ll be less painful than ten minutes of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.) This was a movie I would have been more than happy to leave in the past, but Pendragon Pictures had to keep kicking. They really want to play with the big boys, and now they’re taking on the biggies in the comic book world.
According to a press release sent out by Pendragon, they have issued legal notice to Dark Horse Comics, accusing the third largest comic publisher of ripping off their movie. Yes, that’s right, a movie based on a book in public domain is suing a comic book publisher that made a comic based on the same public domain novel.
To be fair, Pendragon Pictures lawsuit is a little more specific. They claim Dark Horse replicated “camera angles, designs, character likenesses and a myriad of artistic choices for their comic.” To that end they’ve put up a website with frames from the movie in comparison to images from the comic book. In some cases they’ve even given the appropriate excerpts from the book to show where they feel they’ve been wronged.
Pendragon producer Susan Goforth makes no secret that the company has had problems with the movie prior to this: “It was hard enough going up against Spielberg and Tom Cruise. It’s no surprise that our movie was savaged by the friends and allies of our competitors.” Frankly, I’m tempted to offer up legal formal notice over this statement, which implies their movie was given negative reviews by allies of the Spielberg movie. If I have some friendship with Spielberg I’m not aware of it, and anyone who listens to my audio show knows I’m no friend of Cruise. I guess it’s hard to accept that the movie was given bad reviews because it is one of the worst films ever to see the light of day. That same denial and delusions of grandeur certainly explain the motivation behind this lawsuit.
I normally wouldn’t promote this sort of foolish lawsuit, but the site they’ve set up shows just how bad the movie is visually in a lot of ways – images that were mysteriously unavailable when the movie was reviewed. Perhaps they knew how bad the film was then and didn’t want to put that out there. Judge for yourself: legitimate legal action or pushing that fifteen minutes of ill-won fame a little longer. Head over to www.martianinvaders.com and decide for yourself.
