I usually reserve the “can’t” and “never” remarks for extreme circumstances and this is no exception. Fox can’t stop Warner Brothers from releasing Watchmen. It would be suicide for them. With all the theaters pre-sold Fox would catch holy hell from every major movie chain in America. Aside from that Timewarner cable would spite Fox by dumping all of their pay-per-view titles. Fox is really signing a check that their asses can’t cash on this one. Additionally, if the court finds that Fox’s complaint isn’t valid they’d be opening themselves up to a lost business claim that could cost the better part of a billion dollars. That would cripple Fox for at least the next three tent-pole movie seasons.

Getting back to the theaters. No theater company is going to back Fox when WB is riding high off the Batman franchise, a new Harry Potter is coming, Terminator is starting to look like it might actually have legs and Fox has just tanked with the X-Files Movie. What I really smell is sour grapes over Clone Wars (arguably one of WB’s weaker franchise titles) being the first Star Wars film to get a theatrical release without the Fox banner across it.

This originally came from Variety but I discovered it from Val’s blog.

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