Our coming-of-age and origin story begins with one of the world's top-selling action figures: a character in three decades' worth of movies, television shows, toys and comics, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
To make the jump to the big screen in April, the ninja turtles first had to emerge from the original TMNT toys in Playmates' line that started in 1984. Playmates' turtles were, at times, weird inversions of their cartoon counterparts: they rarely talked, only in grunts and grumbles, and they had to be taught how to walk.
But the toy turtles were hugely popular, to the point of being the first line-wide licensing success for the company.
Playmates was owned by Jim Henson Co., which had a long-running relationship with Frank Marshall, the film producer who had given us the live action Transformers movies in the late 1980s. Marshall, in turn, had a relationship with a New York production company called Gold Circle Films.
Gold Circle had experience making low-budget live action movies, but it also had a relationship with the cartoon, the turtles' biggest market, and it was eager to move from the cartoons to the big screen.
So, in 1993, Marshall and Gold Circle entered into an arrangement with Playmates. Playmates' license ran for an initial period, and then a new license would be set up for a new company — whose ownership rights would be passed to Gold Circle. In return for the deal, Gold Circle got to take the Playmates' toys to the big screen, for any new movie being made. And Playmates kept the turtle business rolling, for all the toys, TV and movies that followed.
In the movie business, that's how things work. Studios don't buy things just to own them, but to put them into their movies.
Playmates' role in the franchise was that of a lender: The company had the rights to the toys, so it could produce and sell them, but it was just lending the characters for a movie, rather than owning them outright.
Playmates got the first movie's rights for $6.5 million.
The movie it delivered in 1993 was terrible: It bombed. Critics wrote it off as a product of its time, and it's since been described as one of the worst films ever. This time, though, the cartoon turtles didn't have a huge fan base — and the film wasn't even good enough to make it a hit. So it was shelved in the can. (Eventually it did get some love and become a cult classic, but that's a different story.)
According to the Los Angeles Times, the project "saddled Playmates with years of litigation."
Ultimately, the deal went sour. Playmates had already paid out millions to produce and distribute the first film, and it was ready to spend more to do the same thing again.
The other major player in the new film was New Line Cinema, which had created the original turtle movies, and, as Gold Circle's then-co-chairman, had the most to lose. At the same time, Playmates was the biggest consumer of the toys, the thing that kept the property alive, and New Line had been producing the cartoon in recent years. (The first movie's budget came out of Warner Bros., not New Line, so the studio wasn't in the picture when the first movie flopped.)
Gold Circle made Playmates a sweet deal. For some reason, according to Variety, the terms are confidential, but the magazine said at the time that it came to millions, plus half the profits.
In exchange for its work on the first film, Playmates got rights to the next three, a deal that made the studio millions, and provided it an ownership stake in the franchise, but at a potentially heavy cost.
And New Line? Well, New Line lost some of its ability to be able to make money on a single franchise for a good number of years, according to its own accounts. In the words of the film website The Numbers, New Line "blew the doors out of its financial house and walked into a sea of litigation."
In the end, it was Gold Circle's Gold Circle that won out, but the deal had two separate ownership streams for the TMNT properties. And it's that second stream that may have provided the answer to how the current, weird ownership tangle for the turtle business came about:
And so the turtles that are the same today as they were in the early '90s were created by an ownership arrangement that was meant to make money for a company that didn't want to make the movies, and a company that didn't make the toys, and a company that didn't make the comics.
So did Playmates own them? It didn't, in any meaningful way.
Does any studio own a brand? Not really, no.
Copyright on the characters can be tricky, and there are always going to be conflicting claims of ownership. But for the most part, the characters of these franchises are the products of many people and companies working together.
Copyright is about something else. It's about having the legal power to exercise control over something, and to be able to protect that something from others.
Copyright has always been messy, but for most of its history, the law governing it and its use has been largely consistent and predictable. The law has gotten a lot more difficult, though, and in the last 20 years, the business of licensing characters for movies and other projects has increasingly gotten more complicated — often times more complicated than copyright law.
"When I look at the film industry in the U.S., you don't have any of that copyright any more," said Bruce Ramer, a partner at the New York intellectual property law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which helped represent the producers and artists on TMNT: Out of the Shadows. "Nobody ever goes to a lawyer and says, 'I want to license my work for a movie.' It's a weird situation."
The TMNTs, it turns out, are just the tip of the copyright iceberg. There are lots of characters that are a lot like the TMNTs, and it's harder than ever to nail down who owns what — and what's being used and exploited, and when it's appropriate to do so.
The question about how the rights to TMNT are currently structured is, in a weird way, a little academic — not because there's no way to make any money from the properties, but because Paramount is in the process of working that out. At the moment, they just need to figure out the rights structure to make sure there's no legal hurdles that will stop them from producing the new film.
But the question of who owns the TMNTs, and who gets to use them, remains, and that's something that the courts will have to resolve: Which companies are authorized to use the characters, and under what circumstances, are questions that are up for determination.
In the past, the major motion picture industry had a strong incentive
