Sam Raimi is gearing up to shoot Oz: The Great And Powerful, and while he’s got his main cast together, there’s still room for a few more faces, with the latest being Abigail Spencer (Mad Men, Cowboys & Aliens). THR says that she’ll play a young woman in Kansas who willingly participates in Oz’s magic tricks, before he is actually transported to Oz via a tornado.
James Franco is in the title tole as Oz, while Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams will play witches good and bad.
However a possible fly has been thrown in the ointment by a legal decision Warner Bros. has just won. They’d sued a copmany that had taken out-of-copyright images from the likes of 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz and Gone With The Wind and put them on a new range of merchandise – but without paying Warner. The studio argued that while the images themselves were out of copyright, they still owned the depiction of the characters on film.
THR reports that an appeals courts has now said it agrees with Warner, saying, “We agree with the district courts conclusion that Dorothy, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, Scarlett OHara and Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind, and Tom and Jerry each exhibit consistent, widely identifiable traits in the films that are sufficiently distinctive to merit character protection under the respective film copyrights….Put more simply, there is no evidence that one would be able to visualize the distinctive details of, for example, Clark Gables performance before watching the movie Gone with the Wind, even if one had read the book beforehand. At the very least, the scope of the film copyrights covers all visual depictions of the film characters at issue, except for any aspects of the characters that were injected into the public domain by the publicity materials.”
The bolded bit is important, as it means Disney is now going to have to be very careful going forward. The judges have basically said that while literary works such as The Wizard Of Oz are in the public domain, the image of the characters in the 1939 movie is indelibly linked to it, and Warner does own that. While it probably means that Warner’s case is now strengthened if anyone does anything Oz based that could be said to be aping a copyrighted aspect specific to the 1939 film (such as ruby slippers, as they were silver in the book), the wording could be said to give Warner control over any depiction of those characters on film, even though L. Frank Baum’s actual stories are out of copyright. It the studio decides to push the issue, it could potentially lead to a big legal mess.
It probably won’t stop Disney’s film, but you can be certain the House Of Mouse’s lawyers will be going over this latest ruling with a fine toothcomb, to ensure there’s nothing in Sam Raimi’s movie that could infringe this strengthened copyright (even then, Warner could later sue, citing the new ruling to say they now outright own the characters on film). Shooting on Oz: The Great & Powerful is scheduled to begin later this month in Michigan.