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I don't play as much any more, so i don't stick my head in very often, but is anyone doing anything with Robotech? There was, I think one book published for SW after Palladium lost the license, and that was it.

The comics came and went, and really weren't liked that much, and I haven't heard anything for any kind of multimedia, save for some side-shooter that looked like it came from the 1990s.

Is that it for Robotech?

Strange Machine Games also has a Robotech RPG, and are actively working on a second sourcebook.

There are also a number of “board games” being produced.

I rather liked the comics and I believe that Remix will be returning soon (was delayed due to pandemic restrictions).

mech798 wrote:Is that it for Robotech?

Pretty much.

Robotech animation has been a dead property for about seven years now. Harmony Gold cut off funding for new development back in 2007 after the Shadow Chronicles debacle, trotted out a bad dub of MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive in 2013 as a glorified DVD extra, and then gave up the ship entirely after their 2014 Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a new TV series pilot flopped so hard it failed to reach even 40% of its relatively meager $500,000 pledge goal.

Titan Comics quietly cancelled the only Robotech comic series - Robotech Remix - back in or before January 2020 for reasons unknown. They later attempted to blame its cancellation on the UK's coronavirus lockdown measures, apparently in the hope that Robotech fans wouldn't bother to look at the dates and notice the book had already missed two months worth of deadlines prior to the start of the lockdown. (It's hypothesized that the book was either cancelled due to low sales or due to some complication from Harmony Gold losing a trademark dispute with Macross's owners around that time.)

So nothing new is coming in terms of growing the Robotech story.

There's some cheap, low-quality merchandise being turned out by a few licensees but it's nothing to write home about. Trade paperback reprints of select old Robotech comics (mainly Comico's) that were coming out of Titan Comics, a cheap cardstock board game, a Nintendo Switch port of a Robotech Gameboy Advance game that was nominated for Most Disappointing Game of its year when it first came out in '02, some old Family Home Entertainment Robotech VHS tapes they found collecting dust in a closet (No, really. That is a thing that actually happened.), and a couple of collector's edition toys at quality levels ranging from "deeply embarrassing" to "adequate". (It is interesting to note that Robotech's high-end merchandise is no longer Robotech-branded... Toynami's "retro" VF-1 toys and CalibreWings models carry no Robotech branding, and the upper mid-tier stuff they have from KitzConcept uses Macross logos much more prominently than Robotech's.)

Yet there was supposed to be a switch of administration and a tighter relationship with Sony, starting this year.
Some product and licenses stopping, other being in discussion. I doubt we'll see much before the end of summer, with the slowed down world and such.
The movie is still "in discussion", but we can only guess what the effect of the whole hollywood schedule, being ported "one year later", has done financially to the project.

mech798 wrote:I don't play as much any more, so i don't stick my head in very often, but is anyone doing anything with Robotech? There was, I think one book published for SW after Palladium lost the license, and that was it.

The comics came and went, and really weren't liked that much, and I haven't heard anything for any kind of multimedia, save for some side-shooter that looked like it came from the 1990s.

Is that it for Robotech?

New art books from Udon are listed at various online stores, but I don't recall any official announcement.

xunk16 wrote:Yet there was supposed to be a switch of administration and a tighter relationship with Sony, starting this year.

... that's a very misleading way to describe what happened which makes it sound like far more of a development than it actually was.

In truth, all that actually occurred was that Harmony Gold sublicensed the rights it holds under its license with Tatsunoko Production and the rights to its original Robotech developments to a firm called Kew Media Group... who, in turn, sublicensed those rights to Funimation. It was little more than a very roundabout way of saying "Funimation will distribute Robotech again".

Though, funnily enough, that may have never actually happened. You see, just a few weeks after Funimation made the announcement that they had acquired the Robotech license from the Kew Media Group, the Kew Media Group announced that its CFO had provided investors with inaccurate information about the company's working capital. KMG defaulted on $100 million in loans, went into the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, liquidated its assets, and went out of business all in Q1 2020. Many of the contracts they had struck were terminated in bankruptcy. It's likely that spate of contract terminations included Funimation's license, which would go a ways towards explaining why Funimation hasn't so much as mentioned Robotech since the announcement that it'd licensed the show from KMG and why the titles Funimation licensed don't appear in their catalog of licensed properties.

xunk16 wrote:Some product and licenses stopping, other being in discussion. I doubt we'll see much before the end of summer, with the slowed down world and such.

There has been no indication of any disruption in Robotech's existing licensing... apart from the implications of Big West's legal victories in the United Kingdom, European Union, and China.

xunk16 wrote:The movie is still "in discussion", but we can only guess what the effect of the whole hollywood schedule, being ported "one year later", has done financially to the project.

As a rule, purely fictive developments tend not to be affected by real world scheduling circumstances.

Nobody is going to make a live-action Robotech movie, because the "Robotech license" doesn't extend to any of the actual IP in Robotech and nobody wants to take a chance of getting sued by the IP owners.

ESalter wrote:New art books from Udon are listed at various online stores, but I don't recall any official announcement.

There is that, though I'd heard they were delayed until ?.

Mind you, the content's not exactly anything new... if you've read the robotech.com Infopedia and the Imai Files you've seen everything they're about to ask you fifty bucks plus shipping for.

If it matters, I independently do stuff -shrug-

Seto Kaiba wrote:

xunk16 wrote:The movie is still "in discussion", but we can only guess what the effect of the whole hollywood schedule, being ported "one year later", has done financially to the project.

As a rule, purely fictive developments tend not to be affected by real world scheduling circumstances.

Nobody is going to make a live-action Robotech movie, because the "Robotech license" doesn't extend to any of the actual IP in Robotech and nobody wants to take a chance of getting sued by the IP owners.

And even if the IP wasn't an issue the failure of the Academy kickstarter at less than 200K would be sending up red flags. If the active fans, who generally tend to be more fanatical than the rank and file, couldn't muster up enough enthusiasm to beat 500K... Well, it doesn't say good things about the chances for a movie success.

Then add the IP headache and honestly, just make your own original IP. Pacific Rim has shown it's doable.

mech798 wrote:

Seto Kaiba wrote:Nobody is going to make a live-action Robotech movie, because the "Robotech license" doesn't extend to any of the actual IP in Robotech and nobody wants to take a chance of getting sued by the IP owners.

And even if the IP wasn't an issue...

It's not: Harmony Gold obviously has the rights to the animation that makes up Robotech; Robotech wouldn't exist if it didn't.

mech798 wrote:...the failure of the Academy kickstarter at less than 200K would be sending up red flags. If the active fans, who generally tend to be more fanatical than the rank and file, couldn't muster up enough enthusiasm to beat 500K... Well, it doesn't say good things about the chances for a movie success.

The makers of a big-budget international movie aren't going to be aiming at a handful of cartoon fans; I doubt a small, failed kickstarter is going to be much of a consideration, especially considering Sony bought the rights after the kickstarter.

ESalter wrote:It's not: Harmony Gold obviously has the rights to the animation that makes up Robotech; Robotech wouldn't exist if it didn't.

It is, actually... Harmony Gold only has, under its license from Tatsunoko Production, the distribution and merchandising rights to that animation.

Harmony Gold can neither use, nor authorize the use of, the intellectual property in the original three shows in new film works without the express consent of the copyright owners. For MOSPEADA and Southern Cross, that's Tatsunoko Production. For Macross, it's Big West. This fact is well attested-to by no less than Carl Macek himself, who indicated this was the reason behind having to redesign the returning characters for Robotech II: the Sentinels , and is corroborated by many MANY publicly accessible court records from the many MANY lawsuits Harmony Gold has been part of over the years including their recent binding arbitration against their own licensing partner Tatsunoko Production.

ESalter wrote:The makers of a big-budget international movie aren't going to be aiming at a handful of cartoon fans; I doubt a small, failed kickstarter is going to be much of a consideration,[...]

"The makers of a big-budget international movie" are in this to make money... that the best this allegedly wildly-popular, genre- and industry-defining franchise could manage with its global audience is that small, failed Kickstarter is not an argument in favor of the property's viability.

More importantly, the legal restrictions on the material being what they are, there's no reason to make a Robotech movie. They can't adapt the Japanese source material without permission from the Japanese copyright owners, so the film is going to have to essentially start from scratch. Why bother slapping the name of a franchise with near-zero brand awareness on an original movie and pay royalties for the use of a title nobody recognizes when they could slap an original title on their original sci-fi movie and keep all the money for themselves?

ESalter wrote:especially considering Sony bought the rights after the kickstarter.

Did they, though? Kevin McKeever publicly retracted HG's claim that Sony had acquired the rights back in 2016, barely nine months after the Sony "deal" was first announced at AnimeExpo 2015, and indicated the contract hadn't actually been finalized. That was the last official statement about the license that we got from HG or Sony. The only "news" has been eventually-disproven reported rumor about involvement of various individuals (e.g. James Wan), and even Andy Muschietti, the last director they talked to about it, indicated the film was unlikely to ever get made due to the property's lack of popularity and inevitably high budgetary requirements in excess of $100 million. Who's going to invest hundreds of millions in a property like Robotech that's so unsuccessful in its native format that neither its owners nor even its own fans are willing to invest even a sum as paltry as $500k in its future?



EDIT: Correction to previous post... the publisher apparently updated the release dates for the artbooks. The Masters Saga book was released four days ago and is now already out of print(!) and the New Generation one is now timed for a May release.

Seto Kaiba wrote:Andy Muschietti, the last director they talked to about it, indicated the film was unlikely to ever get made due to the property's lack of popularity and inevitably high budgetary requirements in excess of $100 million.

Do you still have source on that?

xunk16 wrote:Do you still have source on that?

Andy Muschietti first mentioned that in a 5 September 2019 article covering an interview he did for La Capital, an Argentinian daily newspaper.

https://www.lacapital.com.ar/escenario/ ... 25479.html

Andy Muschietti wrote: «Robotech» es una propiedad complicada. La franquicia no es tan popular en Estados Unidos y necesitás al menos 100 millones de dólares para hacerla. Te chocás con esa limitación, [...]

The article also (accurately) describes Robotech's live action movie purely as a proposal and not an approved project under development.

You'll also notice that, of the three mentioned projects, Muschietti has only actually contracted to work on two of them. His current project is WB/DC's The Flash, which is set for a November 2022 release, and after that WB and Kodansha have him signed to direct a live action Attack on Titan movie. He's not working on Robotech, and he never was. Warner Bros has him locked up thru the end of 2025 easy.

I see... The spanish explains why I hadn't found it.
Thanks. ^^

the difficult part for the Live Action Film Effort is that recent legal proceedings HG has been involved with confirmed that while they have control of the footage of macross for use, they do not control the actual art designs for any of it. so they couldn't stick a VF-1 or Gluag or the SDF-1 into a new video product.
for the live action film this means they'd have to rework basically all the visual elements to be completely distinct from the japanese anime. while a degree of this would be inevitable, the lack of license for the designs means they'll have to make the differences even greater than normal.

and honestly, i'd wonder how free they are to use non-visual elements from the anime in the live action, like the name "zentreadi" or the various mecha designations (SDF-1, VF-1, etc.) since those were already an established part of robotech when the whole rights tangle was sorted out, the existing show that is robotech would have gotten access as a sort of "grandfathered" component.. but wholly new works like a live action show would likely have stricter limits. and it is notable that HG has avoided using Macross elements as a major part of their follow-on films and shows like shadow chronicles or the proposed Academy. we only see it in alternate media derivative products like comics, games, and merchandise. (which tend to have different rules than a film or tvshow)

xunk16 wrote:I see... The spanish explains why I hadn't found it.
Thanks. ^^

One of the unfortunate truisms of Robotech fandom is that positive-sounding news is pretty reliably also fake news.

Harmony Gold's marketing is very fond of wording things in ways that are calculated to give fans the wrong idea entirely without actually saying anything explicitly false.

glitterboy2098 wrote:the difficult part for the Live Action Film Effort is that recent legal proceedings HG has been involved with confirmed that while they have control of the footage of macross for use, they do not control the actual art designs for any of it. so they couldn't stick a VF-1 or Gluag or the SDF-1 into a new video product.
for the live action film this means they'd have to rework basically all the visual elements to be completely distinct from the japanese anime. while a degree of this would be inevitable, the lack of license for the designs means they'll have to make the differences even greater than normal.

Not just the designs, but also the original Japanese scripts and so on. It's a fascinating legal situation as an outside observer, but it must be a source of unending frustration for anyone working on this from the inside. I've had a few candid discussions with HG staff over the years where they've mentioned how their legal counsel was incredibly heavily enmeshed in their creative process as a result of their limited access to the source material and the souring of relations with the Japanese owners of the IP. It reportedly got so bad that Kevin McKeever had to beg management for permission to open social media pages so they could make announcements in a timely manner instead of having to wait days or weeks while even front page news posts for the official website trundled through their legal review process at a snail's pace.

The most agonizing aspect of it would be that every single design conceived for a live-action Robotech movie would have to be exhaustively subjected to distinctiveness tests by legal to ensure no allegations of unlawful derivatization of Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA works come up. It's pure creative paranoia fuel, especially given the sheer diversity of designs that the Macross franchise has applied to transforming fighter jets over the years. (Like what BattleTech's owners have to go through every time HG challenges them in court, but a million times worse because of the vastly higher monetary stakes.)

glitterboy2098 wrote:and honestly, i'd wonder how free they are to use non-visual elements from the anime in the live action, like the name "zentreadi" or the various mecha designations (SDF-1, VF-1, etc.) since those were already an established part of robotech when the whole rights tangle was sorted out, the existing show that is robotech would have gotten access as a sort of "grandfathered" component.. but wholly new works like a live action show would likely have stricter limits. and it is notable that HG has avoided using Macross elements as a major part of their follow-on films and shows like shadow chronicles or the proposed Academy. we only see it in alternate media derivative products like comics, games, and merchandise. (which tend to have different rules than a film or tvshow)

Because distinctive terminology is protected by trademark rather than copyright, this is a question/concern with a much woolier answer because it depends on IP rights protected at a local rather than global level. Trademarks can only be properly enforced in markets where they are registered, so this could potentially become a market-specific blocking point. (Esp. now that Big West has taken the trademarks on Macross in the UK, EU, and China.)

Some terms, acronyms like SDF or VF, are almost certainly too generic to be protected by trademark and therefore "safe". Even terms like "Bioroid" are non-distinctive because they have either been generic terms all along or have been diluted in their distinctiveness by common usage. Fortunately, there aren't too many genuinely distinctive bits of terminology floating around in the source shows. Even terms like "UN Spacy" have been diluted somewhat by other franchises (e.g. Gundam). As bizarre as it sounds, even "overtechnology" is considered a generic term.

It'd be very specific, distinctive terminology unique to the specific Japanese source material like "Zentradi", "MOSPEADA", "Blowsperior", etc. that would be fodder for trouble. Shadow Chronicles referring to Maia as "half-alien" rather than "half-Zentradi" is a bit unclear, since at the time the OVA was made HG held the trademark on that word in the markets it intended to market the film in... but likely omitted it anyway out of a desire to avoid doing anything that might antagonize Macross's owners and a desire to get its own fans to move past the Macross Saga and focus on the future not Macross Saga callbacks.

(The "alternate media derivative products", as you put it, are legally considered to be merchandise and HG's use of designs, characters, etc. in that is protected by HG's license to produce merchandise based on the animation.)

glitterboy2098 wrote:the difficult part for the Live Action Film Effort is that recent legal proceedings HG has been involved with confirmed that while they have control of the footage of macross for use, they do not control the actual art designs for any of it. so they couldn't stick a VF-1 or Gluag or the SDF-1 into a new video product.
for the live action film this means they'd have to rework basically all the visual elements to be completely distinct from the japanese anime. while a degree of this would be inevitable, the lack of license for the designs means they'll have to make the differences even greater than normal.

I don't know which "recent legal proceedings" you mean, but even if true, would "mak[ing] the differences even greater than normal" really make the project undoable?

glitterboy2098 wrote:and honestly, i'd wonder how free they are to use non-visual elements from the anise in the live action, like the name "zentreadi" or the various mecha designations (SDF-1, VF-1, etc.) since those were already an established part of robotech when the whole rights tangle was sorted out, the existing show that is robotech would have gotten access as a sort of "grandfathered" component.. but wholly new works like a live action show would likely have stricter limits. and it is notable that HG has avoided using Macross elements as a major part of their follow-on films and shows like shadow chronicles or the proposed Academy. we only see it in alternate media derivative products like comics, games, and merchandise. (which tend to have different rules than a film or tvshow)

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.
And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

ESalter wrote:I don't know which "recent legal proceedings" you mean, but even if true, would "mak[ing] the differences even greater than normal" really make the project undoable?

Yes. The World Intellectual Proprietary Organization shows just how many nations recognize Big West--and most recently, the UK allowed them to sign in and the current status of the EU doesn't look good for HG, with them failing nearly every test to maintain a trademark.

And the bear in the house is the fact that Big WEst can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who "issued" HG the rights to Macross, never actually had the right to do so. Legally, it's a bit like if I sold you a house--that belonged to someone else.

US Trademark law, contrary to a lot of other nations, tends to favor the "first filer" for a trademark, which is why it's harder (and more expensive) to get rid of it here.

But really, do you think Sony is going to put money into a movie that could get them sued in Australia, the UK, and by the time it comes out, the Eu? Hollywood banks on being able to market movies everywhere.

And let's remember, that Robotech is a small, and honestly not very profitable franchise. To use an example, He-Man, both today and back int eh 1980s could eat robotech alive in terms of how profitable it was. So in addition to the potential legal issues, the property isn't... that valuable.

glitterboy2098 wrote:and honestly, i'd wonder how free they are to use non-visual elements from the anise in the live action, like the name "zentreadi" or the various mecha designations (SDF-1, VF-1, etc.) since those were already an established part of robotech when the whole rights tangle was sorted out, the existing show that is robotech would have gotten access as a sort of "grandfathered" component.. but wholly new works like a live action show would likely have stricter limits. and it is notable that HG has avoided using Macross elements as a major part of their follow-on films and shows like shadow chronicles or the proposed Academy. we only see it in alternate media derivative products like comics, games, and merchandise. (which tend to have different rules than a film or tvshow)

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.[/quote]

I've set in on lectures on IP law by industry professionals where the entire robotech issue is specifically brought up as: Here's a property that is pretty much a graduate lecture on: don't do this, both in terms of hurting the property itself and utterly burning your bridges with the other rights holders.

And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

The film rights weren't pricy and aren't a big deal--companies do that all the time with no intent on making a film--they use the cost of the rights as a loss.

But yeah, they did consider it a dealbreaker because they bought the rights way back in 2015, and only had a script by 2019.

No predevelopment, no actors signing contracts, no prep. Just a script and Hollywood churns out scripts like someone who ate bad rice uses toilet paper.

In fact, the last comment from Andy Muschietti really puts a stake in it:

Robotech "is a complicated property. The franchise is not that popular in America and you need at least $ 100 million to make it. You run into that limitation, but the script is there. There is also interest in" Atack On Titan ", with Warner. It's a great epic action horror movie, "said the filmmaker.

And that's an understatement if anything.

So to recap:
1. you cannot use the most popular part of the Franchise (Macross) unless you want to seal yourself off from a good chunk of the world's movie viewers.
2. If you choose to use Macross, you're restricted to the US and a few other nations where robotech isn't that popular--oh, and a good chunk of your "fan base" loathes HG and will probably pirate the film as much as possible just to hurt you.
3. If you don't use Macross, you're stuck with the parts that hardly anyone cares about, making the film even less popular then it would normally be.
4. All this for a property that is less well known and less profitable than My Little Pony, He Man, Scooby Doo, Transformers...
Well, you get the picture.

ESalter wrote:I don't know which "recent legal proceedings" you mean, [...]

The most recent was Tatsunoko Production Co. Ltd. v. Harmony Gold USA Inc. in 2017, though the limitations inherent in Harmony Gold's rights-under-license only came up as sidebar discussions rather than being directly relevant to the proceedings.

That said, we know from the contract reviews carried out in Japan in the early 2000s triggered by Harmony Gold making a false claim that its license extended to all of Macross in 1999 in a bid to stop imports of Macross toys that HG's rights under license have never changed since the original license agreement between Tatsunoko and Harmony Gold signed on 15 January 1984. HG never had any rights to the intellectual property of Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA. They only hold the distribution and merchandising rights, and only outside the Japanese market.

ESalter wrote:[...] but even if true, would "mak[ing] the differences even greater than normal" really make the project undoable?

Eh... it wouldn't be completely undoable, but the legal necessity of ensuring that any and all materials created for the film were significantly different from the Japanese source material to such an extent that no allegation of access and copying or unlawful derivation would stand up in court would be prohibitively difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to such an extent that it might as well be a completely undoable task.

Just look at what's happened to BattleTech and MechWarrior over the years. If any updated design they trot out looks even the tiniest bit like one of the Unseen? BOOM, lawsuit. Even if they're ultimately vindicated in a jury trial or bench trial, it's so time-consuming and expensive that even victory tastes as bitter as defeat.

ESalter wrote:So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

Unlike copyrights, which are respected internationally under a network of treaties, trademark rights end at the boarders of the nation or trade partnership in which the trademark is registered.

There's no actual obligation, legal or otherwise, to register a trademark on any distinctive term, phrase, slogan, etc. that a company uses in its business. US Patent and Trademark Office records show that Harmony Gold never bothered to apply for any trademarks specifically related to Super Dimension Fortress Macross until the early 2000s. We know from Harmony Gold's staff that the whole reason the company became interested in securing trademark protection for various key terms and logos associated with Macross was that, as they were preparing to relaunch the Robotech franchise in 1999, they discovered that there was a thriving market for imported Macross toys that threatened their plans for a toy deal with Toynami. Because their license offered them no legal recourse to stop the importation of Macross toys from titles other than the original Macross TV series, they filed for those trademarks as a different way to try to stop all of the toy importers from carrying those Macross toys. (It never actually successfully stopped that thriving market, it just meant that the sales moved outside of the areas where HG had registered trademarks, to an array of Japan-based direct-export sellers like HLJ.)

One of the problems that Harmony Gold and anyone making a live-action Robotech movie faces is that, as mentioned above, the rights conferred by registration of a trademark end at the borders of the nation or trade partnership where the trademark was registered. Because it's nation-specific, you can have situations where one company might have registered a trademark on a particular term or slogan in one country while that same term or slogan might be registered by a completely different company in another country. Trademark law invariably includes a framework to challenge a mark's registration and determining who is the rightful owner of that trademark. Big West, of course, has owned the trademarks on Macross in Japan since it was originally created and as we've said HG filed for trademarks in the US and select other markets in the early 2000s. Where this has recently become a problem for Harmony Gold and Robotech is that, in the last few years, Big West has developed an interest in taking Macross global and successfully challenged and overturned Harmony Gold's trademark registrations in several key markets: first in the People's Republic of China, then in the United Kingdom, and most recently in the European Union.

Trying to market a Robotech movie in Japan was always going to be an extremely high-risk maneuver with significant potential to blow up into litigation and a big compensatory damages payout and/or an injunction preventing distribution of the film because of Big West's copyrights and trademarks. Now that Big West has successfully overturned Harmony Gold's trademarks on Macross that were registered in China, the UK, and EU, the area where that risk exists has expanded considerably to encompass critical markets for any big-budget Hollywood film. Making the whole idea of a live-action Robotech movie significantly less attractive to both the studio (who would be assuming the legal risk) and the investors (who would be assuming the monetary risk).

ESalter wrote:And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

As indicated previously, the last actual news from Harmony Gold WRT the Sony license was an admission by Harmony Gold that they had jumped the gun and announced that they'd closed the deal with Sony when they had not actually secured any kind of formal commitment from Sony at all.

The TL;DR here being that we don't actually know if Sony acquired the license or not. HG's last update indicated that they had not.

mech798 wrote:And the bear in the house is the fact that Big WEst can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who "issued" HG the rights to Macross, never actually had the right to do so. Legally, it's a bit like if I sold you a house--that belonged to someone else.

Now this isn't quite accurate.

It can, and has, been demonstrated that there is nothing out of order with Tatsunoko Production having licensed the exclusive film distribution and merchandising rights to the animation of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross television series in markets outside of Japan to Harmony Gold. Big West gave Tatsunoko Production those specific rights as payment for Tatsunoko Production's stepping up to provide financial support in the production of the TV anime when its production costs exceeded what Big West had budgeted.

Where Harmony Gold has run into trouble is on occasions where it has attempted to assert that that license somehow grants them some kind of claim to, first dibs on, or other control over subsequent Macross works to which Tatsunoko Production has no rights. They've been slapped down by the courts a few times over that. That and claiming that having used, with permission, some IP from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA in new Robotech animation somehow gave them partial ownership of that IP and the ability to continue using it however they liked even if they were to lose the license from Tatsunoko. The one time they made THAT claim, it actually caused a brief halt to proceedings so the judge could explain to them that Copyright Law Does Not Work That Way and upbraid Harmony Gold's legal counsel for saying something so incredibly stupid.

mech798 wrote:But really, do you think Sony is going to put money into a movie that could get them sued in Australia, the UK, and by the time it comes out, the Eu? Hollywood banks on being able to market movies everywhere.

Don't forget China. China is a major market for Hollywood these days and that was the first major market where Big West successfully overturned Harmony Gold's trademarks.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:I don't know which "recent legal proceedings" you mean, but even if true, would "mak[ing] the differences even greater than normal" really make the project undoable?

Yes. The World Intellectual Proprietary Organization shows just how many nations recognize Big West--and most recently, the UK allowed them to sign in and the current status of the EU doesn't look good for HG, with them failing nearly every test to maintain a trademark.

And the bear in the house is the fact that Big WEst can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who "issued" HG the rights to Macross, never actually had the right to do so. Legally, it's a bit like if I sold you a house--that belonged to someone else.

You mean, Tatsunoko? I thought they had international distribution and merchandising rights to SDF Macross.

mech798 wrote:But really, do you think Sony is going to put money into a movie that could get them sued in Australia, the UK, and by the time it comes out, the Eu? Hollywood banks on being able to market movies everywhere.

Japan was always going to be a problem WRT Macross trademarks: Sony either had a way around them (e.g., deMacrossizing Robotech), or was willing to forgo at least one country. But yes, the loss of trademarks in Britain, Australia, and maybe Europe is a good point.

mech798 wrote:And let's remember, that Robotech is a small, and honestly not very profitable franchise. To use an example, He-Man, both today and back int eh 1980s could eat robotech alive in terms of how profitable it was. So in addition to the potential legal issues, the property isn't... that valuable.

What evidence do you have the He-Man represents the minimum profitability for a viable movie? Because Sony evidently disagrees.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:and honestly, i'd wonder how free they are to use non-visual elements from the anise in the live action, like the name "zentreadi" or the various mecha designations (SDF-1, VF-1, etc.) since those were already an established part of robotech when the whole rights tangle was sorted out, the existing show that is robotech would have gotten access as a sort of "grandfathered" component.. but wholly new works like a live action show would likely have stricter limits. and it is notable that HG has avoided using Macross elements as a major part of their follow-on films and shows like shadow chronicles or the proposed Academy. we only see it in alternate media derivative products like comics, games, and merchandise. (which tend to have different rules than a film or tvshow)

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

I've set in on lectures on IP law by industry professionals where the entire robotech issue is specifically brought up as: Here's a property that is pretty much a graduate lecture on: don't do this, both in terms of hurting the property itself and utterly burning your bridges with the other rights holders.

My point was that I was doubtful about HG's rights to Robotech having anything to do with "grandfathering"; opinions on HG's business practices isn't, I think, really relevant.
That said, since you bring it up, maybe you should go into more detail? What you wrote is too vague to be useful.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

The film rights weren't pricy and aren't a big deal--companies do that all the time with no intent on making a film--they use the cost of the rights as a loss.

So companies deliberately waste money as a business decision? I'm sorry, just I don't believe that. I'm going to have to ask you for a citation.

mech798 wrote:But yeah, they did consider it a dealbreaker because they bought the rights way back in 2015, and only had a script by 2019.

No, they didn't. They continued work on it, therefore it wasn't a dealbreaker.

mech798 wrote:No predevelopment, no actors signing contracts, no prep.

So? They spent money on a script.

mech798 wrote:Just a script and Hollywood churns out scripts like someone who ate bad rice uses toilet paper.

Why would you write something like that?

mech798 wrote:In fact, the last comment from Andy Muschietti really puts a stake in it:

Robotech "is a complicated property. The franchise is not that popular in America and you need at least $ 100 million to make it. You run into that limitation, but the script is there. There is also interest in" Atack On Titan ", with Warner. It's a great epic action horror movie, "said the filmmaker.

Did he say that before the latest news from Sony? If not, it wasn't the last comment.

mech798 wrote:And that's an understatement if anything.

How is it an understatement? What's being understated?

mech798 wrote:So to recap:
1. you cannot use the most popular part of the Franchise (Macross) unless you want to seal yourself off from a good chunk of the world's movie viewers.

You're right that the loss of the Macross trademarks in Britain is important, but those trademarks were always a problem, which makes me wonder if Sony already has a way around it.

mech798 wrote:2. If you choose to use Macross, you're restricted to the US and a few other nations...

You haven't mentioned this before, so it isn't a "recap." And as far as I know, if HG loses the EU trademark claims, they still wouldn't be excluded from most countries on Earth.

mech798 wrote:...where robotech isn't that popular...

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Robotech's nation-by-nation popularity numbers; could you provide a citation?

mech798 wrote:...oh, and a good chunk of your "fan base" loathes HG and will probably pirate the film as much as possible just to hurt you.

So you're saying

1. There are a huge number of Robotech fans eager to hurt sublicensors, with no other motive but to hurt them?
2. Sony knows this?

Can you provide a citation for this?

mech798 wrote:3. If you don't use Macross, you're stuck with the parts that hardly anyone cares about, making the film even less popular then it would normally be.

You haven't mentioned this before, so it isn't a "recap." And can you provide a citation for the relative popularity of the different sections of Robotech?

mech798 wrote:4. All this for a property that is less well known and less profitable than My Little Pony, He Man, Scooby Doo, Transformers...

Do you have any evidence of this?*

mech798 wrote:Well, you get the picture.

Well, I appreciate your pointing me to the information on HG's trademark problems, but honestly, as far I can see, most of what you've written is just made-up.

*I mean Scooby-Doo. obviously, not the Transformers.

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:...oh, and a good chunk of your "fan base" loathes HG and will probably pirate the film as much as possible just to hurt you.

So you're saying

1. There are a huge number of Robotech fans eager to hurt sublicensors, with no other motive but to hurt them?
2. Sony knows this?

Can you provide a citation for this?

I don't have specific numbers, but I have no doubt the Sony execs would have had the capacity to notice the very vehement Macross fans out there, that are HG-bashing anything Robotech into oblivion. Searching on the topic, one falls most assuredly on a comment section, or forum, filled to the brim with them. Mostly people waiting for HG to fall, and Macross to finally impose its dominance on the international and US markets. Some can be... of an acquired taste. While this could be considered a sort of fanaticism, I hardly would describe the behaviour specifically as that of a Robotech fan. Its all rather sad, really. In all fairness, I think it would be hard to mark someone as an HG fan specifically.
Though Sony has a chance / would have a chance to alter this repute.

Surprisingly enough, HG themselves have shoehorned that tradition into existence, by capitalizing always on Macross; to the detriment of a unified Robotech.
To the point where it would be indeed a financial "risk", to turn back to a more appropriate advertisement of the franchise. (If that is even possible, legally and or financially.) At least as far as the general numbers would show, by this point. (With more Macross products out there, than anything else of the other two eras, it would be normal to consider those are the ones who sell the best. And in turn, this favour the creation of more Macross oriented merchandising, to the detriment of the other two. A perfect vicious circle...)

If Sony ever get that movie on the rolls, they will probably also have considered the possibility of going for new and expanded universe material. Especially since the brand itself might benefit, from a leap outside of the current debate. But this, in itself, must certainly be a difficult artistic process.
Making Macross the flagpole of Robotech itself was, in hindsight, a misguided decision... (In my own opinion.)

If the first LIVE movie ends up as being low budget ASC troopers, playing predator in a viet jungle, going after a unit of master's clone gone rogue... I'll still be happy. And if they prefer to go a bit higher in budget, and make this a sentinel era movie, centred around a STORM team or some UEEF explorer corps' corvette, meeting a yet unknown alien species... it still could work. Problem is to have a starting point to amass a new fanbase. (Given, these are both Palladium inspired ideas, but this would remain easier to buy back than Big West shenanigans.)
Franchises are hardly all produced, or watched, in chronological order anymore. The plethora of super hero stuff on streaming got sure of this. And the bayformers era demonstrated one could do money without even looking at a production bible. Given, it appealed to its own fanbase rather that the original one, but it still endured.

So... if they really wanted to make this work, I doubt the handful of old hardcore "fans" would account for much.
Disney killed Star Wars, and yet... the horror show still goes on.

ESalter wrote:

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

HG wasn't given the MAcross trademarks. They independently registered them in the US and other markets, the US gives precedence to first registration to a trademark, while other nations consider who had the right to register that trademark.
That's why HG has been consistently losing that trademark right in other nations. Tatsanuko only had the right to license the direct animation, and nothing more, and thus HG was claiming broad rights regarding an intellectual property that they did not, in fact have--as the courts in most of the rest of the world have agreed. That's why they've been losing.

The main reason this has been going on so long is that Big West for much of the 1990s and early 2000s really didn't care that much about marketing beyond Japan. Now that they've started taking action--well note their success.

And yes. It is complicated--which is why a good IP attorney can run over 700 dollars an hour, just for talking to him (actually doing stuff can get much more expensive).

ESalter wrote:And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

The film rights weren't pricy and aren't a big deal--companies do that all the time with no intent on making a film--they use the cost of the rights as a loss.

ESalter wrote:So companies deliberately waste money as a business decision? I'm sorry, just I don't believe that. I'm going to have to ask you for a citation.

Do you know how tax law works? A business can write off the expense for various things that don't pan out against the profits of other ventures. If you purchase a property (including IP), you can then say: I spent X money on that, and I didn't get anything back so I can use that as a business expense against other profits. Hell, this is done all the time in small business--on a lower level, but if you buy a business computer, the IRS lets you deduct that cost.

But the trick is, if you don't do anything with a script, then it's pretty much easy money you can apply to another property that might make money, *especially* if you're engaging in the creative accounting Hollywood is so well known for and padding how much you're actually paying.

Even if you're not doing that, the average cost for a spec script or screenplay is 110,000 dollars. That's... peanuts. Sony pulls down over 4 billion dollars a year, and the total cost for the script is less than what some executive cars cost.

But yeah, they did consider it a dealbreaker because they bought the rights way back in 2015, and only had a script by 2019.

ESalter wrote:No, they didn't. They continued work on it, therefore it wasn't a dealbreaker.

No predevelopment, no actors signing contracts, no prep.

ESalter wrote:So? They spent money on a script.

Which is again, something that happens fairly often in Hollywood and the cost of a script is fairly negligible compared to the cost of even preproduction.
Just a script and Hollywood churns out scripts like someone who ate bad rice uses toilet paper.

ESalter wrote:Why would you write something like that?

Because that's the truth? Hollywood, every year, has about 50,000 completed screenplays. registered with the WGA every year. Of those, anywhere from 50-120 get picked up. Of the 50,000 completed screenplays, a small number may be bought or optioned, and never put into production. A screenplay or script means *nothing* to the development of a movie in terms of seeing it go into production. It's just the thing you shop around to show to directors and such.

Oh, also to get to the question of IP rights above, if your agreement with the IP holder requires "development" to hold on to the rights, this can often be used to prove that you are in fact developing the property, although some contracts require more substantial steps.

2. If you choose to use Macross, you're restricted to the US and a few other nations...

ESalter wrote:You haven't mentioned this before, so it isn't a "recap." And as far as I know, if HG loses the EU trademark claims, they still wouldn't be excluded from most countries on Earth.

And China. And Australia. And the UK. IE, about every major industrialized nation on the planet not named America.

4. All this for a property that is less well known and less profitable than My Little Pony, He Man, Scooby Doo, Transformers...

ESalter wrote:Do you have any evidence of this?*

Oh. My. Lord. I mean, let's just look at scooby doo compared to robotech:

Robotech: 1 series in the 1980s. Largely wasn't repeated. A toyline that pretty much died out and is only now available to collectors, because few stores sell it, and the only ones that do tend to be specialty stores.
A total of three post series specials, none of which made it to TV, none of which made it to theatrical release. Four if you want to count the utter fiasco of Megazone 23. But okay, let's count that. Less than *two hours* of original animation was done for all of them. Two hours in over thirty years.

Let's compare this to Scooby doo.

14 seasonal, multi-season shows. Released on broadcast, cable and more recently, streaming media. Most of them still available.

FOUR animated television films which were broadcast.

A total of Thirty-FIVE direct to video films.

One Animated Theatrical release.

Two live-action and profitable Theatrical releases. (Scooby Doo the movie made $275 million worldwide, while the second movie made $181 million worldwide.)

Three live-action TV and direct to video shows.

Innumerable crossovers, including a recent Supernatural episode.

This isn't even covering all of their specials, web shorts, etc, etc.

In gaming, vs. the Robotech juggernaut of 2-5 released game lines, Scooby-Doo has, at a minimum, 20 video games, pretty much all of which were more profitable than Robotech's examples.

Let's not forget the six authorized live-action plays.

In terms of merchandising? In 2016 listed merchandise sold $501 million dollars worth, which could probably eat the total lifetime revenue of robotech and put it down as a rounding error.

Then there's the cultural effect--from the whole "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" references to the fact that kids still wear scooby doo costumes for Halloween (havne't seen a rick hunter costume, odd that).

Robotech is a obscure franchise which has no real grip on the popular imagination save for a few fans. It cannot be compared, at all, to any moderately successful property, let alone a juggernaut like Scooby Doo.

In terms of popularity, the director had it--go with Attack on Titan, which has a growing fan base that skews young, not a dying, shrinking fanbase.

xunk16 wrote:If Sony ever get that movie on the rolls, they will probably also have considered the possibility of going for new and expanded universe material. Especially since the brand itself might benefit, from a leap outside of the current debate. But this, in itself, must certainly be a difficult artistic process.
Making Macross the flagpole of Robotech itself was, in hindsight, a misguided decision... (In my own opinion.)

The core error was trying to pull the end run RE the rights. If HG had simply said: We want the rights to the MAcross part of robotech, which Tatsnuko actually could give, I doubt there would have been much of an issue. In fact, given how secondary Big West saw foreign rights, it's not at all unlikely that they could have then picked up the later series, either to shoehorn them into Robotech or just produce English Macross dubs.

But tried to get sneaky, got in the middle of a fight, and royally angered Big West, so that when Big West started realizing that the foreign rights were worth something, they had no interest in working with HG.

TL : DR, maintaining an ethical business stance isn't just moral, it can often be the difference between a business competitor, and someone who has it out for you in a direct, personal way.

xunk16 wrote:I don't have specific numbers, but I have no doubt the Sony execs would have had the capacity to notice the very vehement Macross fans out there, that are HG-bashing anything Robotech into oblivion.

Oh my, no... you're giving the Macross fandom far too much credit here, no doubt due to being relatively new to Robotech yourself.

Robotech's own fans have always been far and away the most vehement and vitriolic group "bashing anything Robotech into oblivion". When the fanbase first started to establish itself online via Usenet, the online Robotech fandom was basically a semi-perpetual flame war. Battle lines were swiftly drawn in terms of what fans considered "real Robotech" and the ensuing infighting between fans of the original TV series ("Purists"), fans of the comics ("Spanglerists"), and fans of the novels ("McKinneyists"), drove all but the most determined fans away from the franchise. Macek's final, fumbling attempt to revive interest in the Robotech brand via the Robotech 3000 series sank without trace and ended Macek's tenure as Robotech's creative director because fans near-universally panned the show's teaser trailer at FanimeCon 2000. Overwhelmingly negative fan feedback to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles played a role in getting the "Shadow Saga" OVA cancelled as well, and led to the mass bannings on Robotech.com that ultimately destroyed the nexus of the online fan community and drove many remaining fans away from the franchise. Robotech Academy, of course, was a very public failure because many fans found it to be disgustingly low-quality and found Harmony Gold's attempts to use Carl Macek's then-recent passing in a transparent effort to manipulate them into funding the project offensive, and saw nothing wrong with pledging a dollar to fill the comment section with expressions of their displeasure.

Macross fans who feel strongly enough about the HG situation to vehemently bash Robotech are a very small minority of its fanbase.

To be blunt, if it weren't for the legal roadblock Robotech represents to Macross, Robotech would be entirely beneath the notice of the Macross fanbase.

xunk16 wrote:Mostly people waiting for HG to fall, and Macross to finally impose its dominance on the international and US markets.

Not just Macross fans. Harmony Gold has made a LOT of enemies in the fanbases of far more popular and successful franchises because of their reckless and often comical threats of litigation. A lot of Transformers and BattleTech fans would celebrate if Harmony Gold's Robotech franchise were to finally close its doors.

To most, it'd be like living in a country where only the first Star Wars movie and the Hardware Wars parody were released, with the makers of Hardware Wars standing in the way of the rest of Star Wars being released to protect an investment they do nothing with.

xunk16 wrote:Surprisingly enough, HG themselves have shoehorned that tradition into existence, by capitalizing always on Macross; to the detriment of a unified Robotech.
To the point where it would be indeed a financial "risk", to turn back to a more appropriate advertisement of the franchise. (If that is even possible, legally and or financially.) At least as far as the general numbers would show, by this point. (With more Macross products out there, than anything else of the other two eras, it would be normal to consider those are the ones who sell the best. And in turn, this favour the creation of more Macross oriented merchandising, to the detriment of the other two. A perfect vicious circle...)

To be blunt, this is a spectacularly tone-deaf statement that mistakes effect for cause.

The reason that Robotech has always prioritized connections to the Macross Saga in development of new Robotech material and in its merchandising line is because the Macross Saga is the most popular of Robotech's sagas by an ABSOLUTELY GARGANTUAN margin. The New Generation is a vanishingly distant second-best in terms of its popularity with fans, and the Masters Saga is a near-universal "un-favorite" among Robotech fans with only a few vocal defenders. When it comes to merchandising, unless you're a real idiot you focus your efforts where demand exists. It's not that Robotech fans focus on the Macross Saga because that's where all the merchandising is, it's that that's where all the merchandising is because that's the one part of Robotech that most fans actually like. Some Robotech licensees, like Toynami, did try to expand their lines into other sagas and were met with failure because the fan interest wasn't there even during the franchise's renaissance in the early 2000s. Where Toynami's "Masterpiece" VF-1 toys swiftly sold out in preorder, the sluggish sales performance of the New Generation entries in that line was so bad that Harmony Gold's fulfillment center was still sitting on unsold inventory more than a decade after their release even though their limited edition runs were a fraction of the size that Macross Saga toys got in anticipation of lower sales volumes.

There's no vicious cycle here, just the natural economics of supply and demand. Licensees are focusing their efforts where past performance and audience metrics show demand actually exists.

The only reason there were a few recent efforts to produce more merchandise for the other sagas is that Robotech's prospects have fallen so far that the only new licensees they can attract now are small-time "indie" outfits and current/former toy bootleggers who are more willing to take risks and deal with such low expected sales volumes.

Your problem is you're assuming there is relatively uniform interest in all portions of Robotech, which is not - and never was - the case.

xunk16 wrote:Making Macross the flagpole of Robotech itself was, in hindsight, a misguided decision... (In my own opinion.)

My good chum, Macross is literally the only reason Robotech exists at all.

Originally, Harmony Gold had no plans to go editing shows together. They licensed Super Dimension Fortress Macross with every intention of just dubbing the series and releasing it to home video in the US. Their plans to do that were hijacked by Revell's attempts to salvage a failed Transformers knockoff called Robotech that used plastic model kits from Macross, Dougram, and Orguss, which messed with Harmony Gold's plans to support their Macross dub with merchandising. So the two entered a partnership, and Revell wanted to get the Macross series onto broadcast TV to help prop up sales of its failing kit lines. So the Macross dub was restarted from scratch and inherited the name of Revell's kit line, but the only way to get the series onto TV was first-run syndication and that required 65 or more episodes.

Robotech as you know it only exists because Harmony Gold needed to increase Macross's episode count for broadcast.

Southern Cross and MOSPEADA were means to that end, and nothing more.

There was no grand creative vision, no great authorial intent, just a mad rush to hastily staple two other Tatsunoko mecha shows to Macross's tail end as quickly and cheaply as possible to get the series on TV and make as much money as possible before the transforming robots bubble burst.[sup]1[/sup]

Macross became the lynchpin of Robotech thereafter because it was simply the most popular of the three sagas by a huge margin, a turn of events literally anyone could've seen coming given that it was the only one of the three component shows that was a hit in its home market. MOSPEADA was a middle-of-the-pack performer with an unsuccessful merchandise line in Japan, and the original Southern Cross flopped so hard that most of its licensees abandoned it and it got cancelled. The franchise simply tried to play to its one and only strength.

xunk16 wrote:If Sony ever get that movie on the rolls, they will probably also have considered the possibility of going for new and expanded universe material. Especially since the brand itself might benefit, from a leap outside of the current debate. But this, in itself, must certainly be a difficult artistic process.

The copyright situation being what it is, if Sony were to make a movie it would essentially have to be all-original material.

At that point, why bother paying royalties to Harmony Gold for the use of a name nobody recognizes anyway when they could just use an original title and keep the profits for themselves?

xunk16 wrote:If the first LIVE movie ends up as being low budget ASC troopers, playing predator in a viet jungle, going after a unit of master's clone gone rogue... I'll still be happy. And if they prefer to go a bit higher in budget, and make this a sentinel era movie, centred around a STORM team or some UEEF explorer corps' corvette, meeting a yet unknown alien species... it still could work. Problem is to have a starting point to amass a new fanbase. (Given, these are both Palladium inspired ideas, but this would remain easier to buy back than Big West shenanigans.)

Even these are not exempt from the copyright problems mentioned previously, because they are based on Tatsunoko Production-owned intellectual property.

xunk16 wrote:Franchises are hardly all produced, or watched, in chronological order anymore. The plethora of super hero stuff on streaming got sure of this. And the bayformers era demonstrated one could do money without even looking at a production bible. Given, it appealed to its own fanbase rather that the original one, but it still endured.

Eh, no... the Michael Bay Transformers movies demonstrated one could make money if you made a big-budget movie that had a baked-in MASSIVE merchandising empire already behind it that'd never had more than a barely-there "buy our toys" plot to begin with.

xunk16 wrote:So... if they really wanted to make this work, I doubt the handful of old hardcore "fans" would account for much.

The problem with this argument is that that handful of old, hardcore fans are very nearly the only ones who remember Robotech exists at all, and the only ones for whom using the name would be a draw.

If Sony wants to make a movie about an alien invasion being fought off with giant robots, they have literally zero incentive to put the Robotech title on it.

xunk16 wrote:Disney killed Star Wars, and yet... the horror show still goes on.

So fans say... but the objective sense of the dollars and cents in Disney's financial reports tells a very different tale about hundreds of millions in profits on every movie except Solo, and a sales of merch that dipped for a few years before spiking again (up 70% last year).



1. Ironically, the whole prospect was doomed from the start since Robotech was attempting to position itself as a toy line-supported children's animated series with material intended for high school audiences and emerged late into an already-glutted market. In the brief period it was on TV, it was competing against already-established properties like G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Challenge of the GoBots, Voltron, Transformers when it first started airing, and subsequent competitors piled on as time passed including She-Ra: Princess of Power, Thundercats, M.A.S.K., The Real Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Robotech never had a chance. It got plowed under so thoroughly that most potential viewers didn't even know it existed, it ratings were never better than iffy, and its toy line was a massive flop.

"Disney killed Star Wars, and yet... the horror show still goes on."

Yes the horror show of more and more content that by all accounts is going to be excellent. The sequel trilogy not being as good as many fans wanted it to be does not a death make but by all means push that opinion if you like but tye franchise is far from dead or "killed"

As a 44 year plus fan I'll be over here enjoying mandalorian, book of fett, ahsoka, rangers, obi-wan, high republic, andor, bad batch, comics, novels etc....and of all of it, while I enjoy the sequels, they are yes disappointing in some ways, it's a property that is alive, well, a making a mint.

Unlike robotech.

jaymz wrote:"Disney killed Star Wars, and yet... the horror show still goes on."

Yes the horror show of more and more content that by all accounts is going to be excellent. The sequel trilogy not being as good as many fans wanted it to be does not a death make but by all means push that opinion if you like but tye franchise is far from dead or "killed"

As a 44 year plus fan I'll be over here enjoying mandalorian, book of fett, ahsoka, rangers, obi-wan, high republic, andor, bad batch, comics, novels etc....and of all of it, while I enjoy the sequels, they are yes disappointing in some ways, it's a property that is alive, well, a making a mint.

Unlike robotech.

That was kinda my point. If this reaction is all they can get from their "fans", maybe its time to take a risk.
They don't really have anything more to loose. Not since 3000 and Academy.
The new SW is nothing we were promised, or were waiting for. And it will never be able to gain back its coherence in mechanical designs and lore.
But the change from being stuck with criticism, to actually pushing something on the market, made some happy. And the online reaction changes nothing to this. Unlike Ridley Scott being too influenced by the deconstruction of Promeheus to Covenant, where you could feel the abandoned plot.
It'll never be more than "in name only", for those who were really involved. But there will be those for whom this is the new reality. Like the transformer Animated fans, irreconcilable with the rest.
A giant like Sony could rebuild it from a comatose propriety into something that sells.

You just can't eternally cater to people who don't want what you can sell.

There is this strange argument here, where changing Robotech would be so hard as to be akin to build a new propriety.
But this already happened at least once, from the first comic run to the animated era, RNU, and the current mess.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe a few designs and a catchy name could be worth the try. It's not like if the respect due to franchises was currently trending.
Visibility, however, does.

EDIT : (With this, however, I feel I've fallen in the trap of pushing this thread outside of its intended subject. Apologies. Feel free to ignore this post at your leisure.)

xunk16 wrote:That was kinda my point. If this reaction is all they can get from their "fans", maybe its time to take a risk.
They don't really have anything more to loose. Not since 3000 and Academy.
[...] You just can't eternally cater to people who don't want what you can sell.

But your point falls apart completely on the reason why that's the only reaction Harmony Gold can get from Robotech fans.

It's because Robotech fans want the impossible... and they're unwilling, or unable, to admit to themselves that their expectations are unreasonable.

You see, the vast majority of Robotech fans emphatically DO NOT care about the Masters Saga or New Generation. They've been quite clear that what they want from Robotech is nothing more or less than the continuing adventures of the Macross Saga characters, in the form of a Robotech II: the Sentinels do-over. Oh, and they absolutely don't want it to be done with a modern art style... they want the iconic Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs from Macross, Ichiro Itano's classic animation style, and a host of other impossible asks like having the VF-1 Valkyries in the series. It's so many different flavors of impossible because of copyrights, budgetary restrictions, essential persons and companies hating their guts, and no network on Earth being willing to give Harmony Gold a series order for Robotech, all the HG staff can do is cry into their beer and try to get Robotech fans to accept an attempt to actually move the story forward... which they will never ever do.

This is why new Robotech developments have ground to a halt every time Harmony Gold has tried. This is why nothing new is being done with Robotech anymore.

This is also why Macross Saga merchandising utterly dominates Robotech's merchandise lines... it's because those are the only characters and designs fans most fans actually connected with and liked. HG's licensees are catering to precisely what the people want.

xunk16 wrote:A giant like Sony could rebuild it from a comatose propriety into something that sells.

But they won't, because there is literally nothing in it for them. Literally. Nothing.

If Sony is going to put in the effort to develop an all-new animated mecha/sci-fi property from scratch to avoid all of the copyright and trademark problems swirling around Robotech, why bother to call it Robotech? It's not like Harmony Gold is going to make any meaningful contribution to the project and what little brand recognition Robotech has is primarily negative, so why not brand their new original property as the original property it is and skip unnecessarily paying royalties to a deadweight company that contributes nothing?

This is why the Robotech live-action movie will never get made. This right here.

xunk16 wrote:There is this strange argument here, where changing Robotech would be so hard as to be akin to build a new propriety.
But this already happened at least once, from the first comic run to the animated era, RNU, and the current mess.

But that's not what happened in any of those cases... and, quite frankly, back then they thought they actually had a market for Robotech. Incorrectly, as it turned out. They know better now.

(Entertainingly, "the current mess" is as close as Robotech has ever gotten to objective, unqualified success.)

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

HG wasn't given the MAcross trademarks. They independently registered them in the US and other markets, the US gives precedence to first registration to a trademark, while other nations consider who had the right to register that trademark.
That's why HG has been consistently losing that trademark right in other nations. Tatsanuko only had the right to license the direct animation, and nothing more, and thus HG was claiming broad rights regarding an intellectual property that they did not, in fact have--as the courts in most of the rest of the world have agreed. That's why they've been losing.

But didn't Tatsunoko have international merchandising rights WRT SDFM? And don't merchandising rights necessarily include trademark rights? (That's the whole point of trademarks, after all.)

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:And in any case, Sony bought the Robotech film rights after the Academy kickstarter, so if there was a legal issue preventing using Macross designs in Academy, Sony didn't consider it a dealbreaker.

The film rights weren't pricy and aren't a big deal--companies do that all the time with no intent on making a film--they use the cost of the rights as a loss.

So companies deliberately waste money as a business decision? I'm sorry, just I don't believe that. I'm going to have to ask you for a citation.

Do you know how tax law works?

Well, no.

mech798 wrote:A business can write off the expense for various things that don't pan out against the profits of other ventures. If you purchase a property (including IP), you can then say: I spent X money on that, and I didn't get anything back so I can use that as a business expense against other profits. Hell, this is done all the time in small business--on a lower level, but if you buy a business computer, the IRS lets you deduct that cost.

But the trick is, if you don't do anything with a script, then it's pretty much easy money you can apply to another property that might make money, *especially* if you're engaging in the creative accounting Hollywood is so well known for and padding how much you're actually paying.

O.K., I have a rudimentary understanding understanding of how an accountant might choose how to define an entry to greatest advantage. But you're saying a production company can literally get scripts for free (from an accounting standpoint) because the write-off is always equal to the price of the scripts themselves? But even then, they aren't making money off them, right?
And why would Sony be contacting directors for a movie they didn't intend to make?

mech798 wrote:Even if you're not doing that, the average cost for a spec script or screenplay is 110,000 dollars. That's... peanuts. Sony pulls down over 4 billion dollars a year, and the total cost for the script is less than what some executive cars cost.

If you spend $110,000 on a car, you intend to have a car. If you spend $110,000 on a Robotech script, you intend to have a Robotech movie.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:But yeah, they did consider it a dealbreaker because they bought the rights way back in 2015, and only had a script by 2019.

No, they didn't. They continued work on it, therefore it wasn't a dealbreaker.

mech798 wrote:No predevelopment, no actors signing contracts, no prep.

So? They spent money on a script.

Which is again, something that happens fairly often in Hollywood and the cost of a script is fairly negligible compared to the cost of even preproduction.

You don't write a script unless you plan to make a movie.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:Just a script and Hollywood churns out scripts like someone who ate bad rice uses toilet paper.

Why would you write something like that?

Because that's the truth?

I was referring to your phrasing.

mech798 wrote:Oh, also to get to the question of IP rights above, if your agreement with the IP holder requires "development" to hold on to the rights, this can often be used to prove that you are in fact developing the property, although some contracts require more substantial steps.

In other words, the writing of scripts and such is evidence of intention to make a movie.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:2. If you choose to use Macross, you're restricted to the US and a few other nations...

You haven't mentioned this before, so it isn't a "recap." And as far as I know, if HG loses the EU trademark claims, they still wouldn't be excluded from most countries on Earth.

And China. And Australia. And the UK. IE, about every major industrialized nation on the planet not named America.

Well, you hadn't mentioned China. I've read that China, Britain, Japan, and USA+Canada are the four biggest film markets, but I have no idea if that's true, and no idea what that means numerically in terms of the importance of the rest of the world.

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:4. All this for a property that is less well known and less profitable than My Little Pony, He Man, Scooby Doo, Transformers...

Do you have any evidence of this?*
*I mean Scooby-Doo. obviously, not the Transformers.

Oh. My. Lord. I mean, let's just look at scooby doo compared to robotech:

You do prove the significance of Scooby-Doo against Robotech. Still, I'm dubious of some of your arguments:

mech798 wrote:Robotech: 1 series in the 1980s. Largely wasn't repeated.

Robotech was a syndicated series. Do you have information for each individual station that ran it?

mech798 wrote:A toyline that pretty much died out and is only now available to collectors, because few stores sell it, and the only ones that do tend to be specialty stores.

Well, it was over thirty years ago. I assume thirty-year-old Scooby-Doo toys are also only now available to collectors and only sold at specialty stores.

mech798 wrote:Then there's the cultural effect--from the whole "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" references to the fact that kids still wear scooby doo costumes for Halloween (havne't seen a rick hunter costume, odd that).

I'm not sure you should expect a somewhat bland pilot character from a giant robot cartoon to be the main focus of identification for a child looking for a Halloween costume.

mech798 wrote:Robotech is a obscure franchise which has no real grip on the popular imagination save for a few fans. It cannot be compared, at all, to any moderately successful property, let alone a juggernaut like Scooby Doo.

But, yes, you're right: Scooby-Doo is a much more culturally significant than Robotech.

mech798 wrote:In terms of popularity, the director had it--go with Attack on Titan, which has a growing fan base that skews young, not a dying, shrinking fanbase.

I don't see the logic of imagining a competition between a Sony Robotech movie and your imaginary Sony Attack on Titan movie. Whether Sony decides to acquire the rights to Attack on Titan, and how it developed them, would depend on what kind of deal Sony could make with AoT's owners and what sort of profit it would receive. What does any of that have to do with Robotech?
And how do you know that Robotech's fandom is dying?

ESalter wrote:But didn't Tatsunoko have international merchandising rights WRT SDFM? And don't merchandising rights necessarily include trademark rights? (That's the whole point of trademarks, after all.)

Yes and no, in that order.

Yes, Tatsunoko Production Co. Ltd. owns the merchandising rights to the 36-episode Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series in markets outside of Japan.

-and-

No, trademark rights must be obtained by independently registering a mark in every nation/region where the user of that particular mark wishes to obtain legal protection for it. Unlike copyrights that are respected internationally under various treaties, trademark rights end at the borders of the nation where the mark was registered. Harmony Gold needed to independently apply for registration of any/all marks that it wanted to obtain trademark protection for in every country where it wanted that protection. Harmony Gold didn't even bother to apply for trademark registration anywhere in any country until ~2000-2001.

ESalter wrote:O.K., I have a rudimentary understanding understanding of how an accountant might choose how to define an entry to greatest advantage. But you're saying a production company can literally get scripts for free (from an accounting standpoint) because the write-off is always equal to the price of the scripts themselves? But even then, they aren't making money off them, right?

Not quite for free, but mech798 actually over-quoted the cost of what Sony paid for by about 4-5x as well.

What Tom Rob Smith et. al. produced for the proposed live-action Robotech movie is a precursor to a script called a treatment. It's basically a draft of the movie formatted like a short story, with no set direction or separated dialog. A studio might pay a dozen or more different writers for various treatments before settling on the direction they want to take for a story, while the writers working on those treatments are taking those gigs as a short-term no-commitments sort of affair to earn a quick payday between contracted projects. A treatment penned by a top-tier Hollywood writer takes only a couple of weeks to write and commands a fee of around $30,000 including a $5,000 advance. Typically, it's half that or less.

The expenses for unused story treatments are already basically petty cash by Hollywood studio standards. Even a completed screenplay typically costs a lot less than mech798 quoted. Writers Guild of America West standard payscale for that has the typical screenplay going for only $72,600 and at most about $132,000.

Between that and other operating expenses, the deductions claimed on the studio's taxes can easily add up to enough to pay for dozens if not hundreds of treatments.

ESalter wrote:And why would Sony be contacting directors for a movie they didn't intend to make?

It's not Sony. It's either Harmony Gold or whatever smaller production house (e.g. Maguire Entertainment, when they were partnered with WB) shopping the treatment around to unaffiliated directors to build up awareness of the project and attract the attention of entertainment news. It's a commonly-used way for an obscure property or unapproved property to get its name out there for potential investors to notice.

It's also really easy to spot these as fake news, because the directors they're approaching aren't affiliated with the studios that allegedly held the license at the time. When WB had the rights, the ones being approached to stir the rumor mill were affiliated with Warner Bros (Sylvain White) and Netflix (Nic Mathieu). Now that the rights allegedly reside with Sony, they're talking exclusively to directors affiliated with Warner Bros (James Wan and Andy Muschietti). It's especially blatant as fake news when those same directors also have existing commitments to much bigger ticket franchises like WB's DC film universe (James Wan went to Aquaman, Andy Muschietti went for The Flash and Attack on Titan), or the directors are wildly inappropriate choices like Sylvian White (who's best known for the dance drama Stomp the Yard) or Nic Mathieu (who had no experience apart from TV commercials).

ESalter wrote:If you spend $110,000 on a car, you intend to have a car. If you spend $110,000 on a Robotech script, you intend to have a Robotech movie.

Studios buy scripts (treatments) all the time with no intention to ever use them. It's especially common if a particular movie becomes a hit, studios will buy up scripts with similar premises even with no intention to produce them either to deny them to their rivals or to have one that they might use later if that one-hit wonder becomes a sleeper trend. Like when The Mighty Ducks came out, there was a run on true sports story scripts and hockey-related scripts. Treatments also aren't nearly as expensive as mech798 made them out to be, they're more like $10,000-30,000. A completed, production-ready screenplay can cost anywhere from $72,600 to $132,000 not counting rewrites, but even that is a petty cash expense in the terms of the average Hollywood studio budget. An actual completed screenplay used to go for as much as $4 million, but the price has tanked ever since the 2007 WGA strike.

ESalter wrote:So? They spent money on a script.

So far, they've purchased four story treatments. They've spent maybe $75k in total. That's not what you'd call a vast cash layout in Hollywood terms. Sony probably didn't even pay for it themselves, it was likely paid for by the producer.

(In terms of Sony Pictures' cashflow, that's about 0.000008% of their annual revenue.)

ESalter wrote:You don't write a script unless you plan to make a movie.

If you're a Hollywood studio, you absolutely do. Frequently. Workshopping a story treatment is one (inexpensive) way of deciding if a story concept is worth developing.

ESalter wrote:In other words, the writing of scripts and such is evidence of intention to make a movie.

In all fairness, it's more like evidence of an intention to see if the proposal has any merit that might justify the effort of making a movie.

ESalter wrote:You haven't mentioned this before, so it isn't a "recap." And as far as I know, if HG loses the EU trademark claims, they still wouldn't be excluded from most countries on Earth.

[...]
Well, you hadn't mentioned China. I've read that China, Britain, Japan, and USA+Canada are the four biggest film markets, but I have no idea if that's true, and no idea what that means numerically in terms of the importance of the rest of the world.

According to the Motion Picture Association's annual study of box office ticket sales, reported gross earnings, and so on, that's a pretty significant chunk of the market.

Excluding the US, China and Japan are ranked #1 and #2 respectively for box office earnings. The UK is #4, Australia is #10, and EU nations have number #5, 7, 11, 12, and 17. That's about 2/3 of the total potential box office take potentially off-the-table for a Robotech movie. ($18.7 billion vs $11.3 billion, so 62.333%) China on its own is almost a big a market as the US, at $9.3 billion.

ESalter wrote:I don't see the logic of imagining a competition between a Sony Robotech movie and your imaginary Sony Attack on Titan movie. Whether Sony decides to acquire the rights to Attack on Titan, and how it developed them, would depend on what kind of deal Sony could make with AoT's owners and what sort of profit it would receive. What does any of that have to do with Robotech?

It's actually a Warner Bros project, Andy Muschietti is a Warner Bros-affiliated director. It's also not imaginary, it was confirmed on 29 Oct 2018 that Warner Bros had acquired a live action movie license from Kodansha to produce a live-action adaptation of Attack on Titan with Andy Muschietti signed to direct. That's been repeatedly confirmed to be his next project after The Flash (also a WB property).

I think the point he was tilting at is that Attack on Titan, being a modern and more importantly relevant anime property, was able to get funded and approved for production right away while we're in year... fourteen!... of "the Robotech movie is coming, maybe" development hell.

ESalter wrote:And how do you know that Robotech's fandom is dying?

It's kinda self-evident, isn't it?

Global circulation for Robotech comics is, according to the distributor, only around 4,000 copies... and that was with multiple collectible covers.

Production runs of limited edition Robotech collectibles were 15,000 units in the early 2000s. Then, around the time RTSC came out, that slipped to 10,000. Then 5,000. Then 1,500. It's 300 now, for an equivalent toy at the same basic price point, and they're largely removed Robotech from the branding in the hopes of attracting Macross fans. They're still sitting on stock of some of these years after they came out.

The official Robotech website's community section is populated entirely by adbots, and an attempt to bankroll a new Robotech TV pilot garnered support from just 2,284 people worldwide... less than half of the 5,342 that Palladium pulled in for a tabletop game just a few years earlier.

Sales reports HG brought to court in their trademark dispute revealed that merchandise sales in some markets were in single digits across spans of YEARS.

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

HG wasn't given the MAcross trademarks. They independently registered them in the US and other markets, the US gives precedence to first registration to a trademark, while other nations consider who had the right to register that trademark.
That's why HG has been consistently losing that trademark right in other nations. Tatsanuko only had the right to license the direct animation, and nothing more, and thus HG was claiming broad rights regarding an intellectual property that they did not, in fact have--as the courts in most of the rest of the world have agreed. That's why they've been losing.

But didn't Tatsunoko have international merchandising rights WRT SDFM? And don't merchandising rights necessarily include trademark rights? (That's the whole point of trademarks, after all.)

actually, no.
while they thought they had them at the time, the agreement with StudioNue/BigWest was for distribution of the footage of the show only. no merchandise or design trademarks. the agreement's wording was unspecific though thus why Tatsunoko thought they had the rights to license out the whole package, and why the legal fight between the two took until the 2000's to sort out in japan. This is one of the reasons that the trademarks have been overturned in other countries, with StudioNue/BigWest conducting lawsuits to exert their claim to the trademarks over the HG/Tatsunoko invalid ones.

HG has taken out "robotech" trademarks on the characters and mecha and such in america but if someone wanted to spend the money to throw lawyers at those and show that they didn't have the right to create those trademarks using that art in the first place, it would pretty much destroy HG's ability to mechandise off the Macross saga. thus why HG has since generally avoided using the macross designs in its original robotech projects. given that their effort to use their trademark claim to stop stuff like the GIJOE/transformers Jetfire toy blew up in their face due to the issue, they are aware that they don't have a very firm foundation to stand on.

and a Sony backed live action film would be a huge excuse to go after those trademarks.

glitterboy2098 wrote:actually, no.
while they thought they had them at the time, the agreement with StudioNue/BigWest was for distribution of the footage of the show only. no merchandise or design trademarks. the agreement's wording was unspecific though thus why Tatsunoko thought they had the rights to license out the whole package, and why the legal fight between the two took until the 2000's to sort out in japan.

Ah, no. Tatsunoko Production absolutely has the "rest of world" merchandising rights (excl. Japan) to Super Dimension Fortress Macross and licensed those rights to Harmony Gold along with the distribution rights (also excl. Japan).

That's literally what's been the crux of every winning argument they've made in court against BattleTech and MechWarrior's owners... that FASA, Catalyst, etc. were violating their exclusive rights-under-license to produce and distribute merchandise based on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross designs outside of Japan. If Tatsunoko didn't have the merchandising rights to license them to Harmony Gold, Big West would've sued the Robotech franchise out of existence ages ago. We wouldn't be here talking about it, because Palladium would've been sued into the ground by Big West for making an unauthorized game using their IP.

What Tatsunoko doesn't have is the Intellectual Property rights to the series. They, and their licensee Harmony Gold, can't go and make new Macross animation or live-action film works using the original designs and setting materials or make new designs and setting materials for animation or live action based on the materials from the original.

Since there seems to be some confusion WRT the prevailing legal situation, the following is the Short Version of the situation in terms of who can do what as drawn from publicly accessible Japanese court records:

Brief History
Shortly after production work on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series began, the show's sponsor and copyright owner Big West noticed that production of the series was going to cost a good deal more than the company had originally budgeted. To cover this financial shortfall, and because they were not initially confident in the show's prospects as they were new to anime sponsorship, Big West struck a deal with the lead production house Tatsunoko Production to co-finance production of the series. They formalized their contract on 1 Oct 1982, and as compensation for their financial assistance Tatsunoko asked for and was granted the distribution and merchandising rights to the series outside of the Japanese domestic market.

On 1 Jan 1984, a SoCal real estate company dabbling in film production named Harmony Gold acquired the foreign distribution and merchandising rights to three mecha anime titles from the Tatsunoko back catalog: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Harmony Gold had originally planned to release a dub of Super Dimension Fortress Macross as a stand-alone series, but was sidetracked by model kit maker Revell who had licensed a number of Macross plastic model kits and was looking to get a tie-in going to help promote the failing kit line. The dub was reworked took on the kit line's name - Robotech - and Macross was lengthened to 85 episodes by adding the episode counts of Southern Cross and MOSPEADA to it to facilitate its sale as a first-run syndication animated children's series in 1985.


What Big West Owns...
As the financial backer for the development of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series, Big West owns the copyrights on all of the intellectual property of the series. That's all the setting materials, backgrounds, character designs, mechanical designs, scripts, and so on. Big West also owns the domestic (Japanese market) distribution and merchandising rights to the series.

Big West also holds the trademarks on Macross's name, logos, etc. in Japan and has recently acquired them in various international markets including China, the UK, European Union, and Australia, giving them exclusive control over usage of the title, logos, and so on in those markets.

What Big West Can Do...
As owners of the intellectual property rights, Big West is the owner of Macross as a whole and basically have a free reign to do whatever they want with it. They can make sequels, spinoffs, side stories, alternate versions, and adapt the story to any format they choose. They can also freely create new designs and setting materials based on the designs and setting materials of the original TV series. They can make and sell any kind of merchandise they please for it in the Japanese domestic market.

What Big West Can't Do...
Distribute or make merchandise based on the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series in markets outside Japan. That's it.



What Tatsunoko Production Owns...
As co-financer of animation production that was uninvolved in the show's development, Tatsunoko Production owns a copyright on the animation itself but not the show's intellectual property. They also have, as compensation for their financial contributions to production of the animation, the "rest of world" distribution and merchandising rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross excluding the Japanese domestic market specifically.

Tatsunoko also has full ownership of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and full or mostly-full ownership of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and can do with those shows as it sees fit.

What Tatsunoko Production Can Do...
Distribute the 36 episode animated series in markets outside of Japanese territory, incl. the ability to selectively edit the series for purposes of dubbing and localization (e.g. producing a dub, removing scenes of nudity, gore, or violence).

Produce merchandise based on the 36 episode animated series for sale in markets outside of Japanese territory, incl. toys, comic books, novels, video games, apparel, and so on.

Tatsunoko also collects a modest profit share from merchandising based on the original series in the Japanese domestic market.

What Tatsunoko Production Can't Do...
Produce, or authorize the production of, derivative works based on the intellectual property of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. That means no adapting the series to another film format (e.g. live action), and no basing future works on the intellectual property of the Macross series.



What Harmony Gold Owns...
Very little. Only what intellectual property the Robotech franchise has produced independently, which is not based on the Japanese source material in any way. This is basically just Robotech as a title, the changed names of the characters, and a few original designs that were not based on anything from the Japanese source material.

Most of Harmony Gold's rights come from its license agreement with Tatsunoko Production, under which it holds the distribution and merchandising rights (excl. Japan) to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA.

Harmony Gold currently holds the trademarks on the Macross name, logos, and certain key terms and art in the United States, having recently lost its trademarks in the aforementioned selected markets overseas due to challenges from Big West. It has exclusive control over usage of the title, logos, and so on in the US market.

What Harmony Gold Can Do...
Distribute the three episode separate animated shows in markets outside of Japanese territory, incl. the ability to selectively edit the series for purposes of dubbing and localization (e.g. producing a dub, removing scenes of nudity, gore, or violence).

Produce merchandise based on the three animated shows for sale in markets outside of Japanese territory, incl. toys, comic books, novels, video games, apparel, and so on.

With the express written permission of Tatsunoko Production, Harmony Gold can use the intellectual property of Southern Cross or MOSPEADA in new animated or live-action works or create derivative works based on that intellectual property (e.g. the Super Shadow Fighter, or the VR-057 Super Cyclone).

What Harmony Gold Can't Do...
Produce, or authorize the production of, derivative works based on the intellectual property of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. That means no adapting the series to another film format (e.g. live action), and no basing future works on the intellectual property of the Macross series. They also cannot produce or authorize the production of derivative works based on Genesis Climber MOSPEADA or Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross without the express consent of Tatsunoko Production.

So... using a suspension of disbelief able to lift a plane carrier for a moment...
Sony could theoretically negotiate, with Big West, to offer them a cut over a Robotech Live Action movie featuring Macross stuff, right?
Thus making a part of the cake, instead of no cake at all?

In theory, yes. But that would probably be unlikely.
Even ignoring the HG/BigWest Mutual animosity over past clashes, odds are that Big West would want concessions from HG, or would insist on a big enough cut of the film's proceeds to make it an expensive prospect.

It seems more likely that Sony would just drop the stuff they could be sued over, and design all new mecha, ships, etc, turning it into it's own continuity.

xunk16 wrote:So... using a suspension of disbelief able to lift a plane carrier for a moment...
Sony could theoretically negotiate, with Big West, to offer them a cut over a Robotech Live Action movie featuring Macross stuff, right?
Thus making a part of the cake, instead of no cake at all?

Eh... if we were to consider the question itself in a vacuum, devoid of any context or history? In a strictly theoretical sense... yes, it would be possible.

But once reality intrudes onto the scenario, the answer changes to a firm "No" for a number of different reasons.

First and foremost (because I can get a meme out of it), it wouldn't happen because The Cake is a Lie. No western movie adaptation of an anime series has ever turned a profit at the box office. To date, the most successful attempts - Alita: Battle Angel and Ghost in the Shell - managed to earn back their production budgets but still fell tens of millions of dollars short of breaking even once the advertising budgets were included in the total. Big West isn't likely to be enticed by the promise of a share of the profits from a film that is all but completely guaranteed to finish in the red.

Secondly, Big West has a highly profitable brand to protect. Macross has always been a fairly steady earner for Big West, but ever since the debut of Macross Frontier almost 13 years ago it's been printing money like never before. The shows get excellent viewership on TV, it sets industry-wide sales records for home video releases, album sales are through the roof, there's a highly profitable mobile game, every new series brings multiple new console games, limited edition merch sells out in a matter of seconds, there are pop-up stores, a museum, a theme restaurant, and the show's singers play to packed stadiums. They have absolutely zero incentive to dilute the Macross brand by enabling Sony and HG.

Third and lastly, Harmony Gold has done basically everything in its power to **** Big West off and burn every bridge to ensure that there's zero possibility of Big West ever agreeing to anything that may benefit Harmony Gold in any capacity. The last company to try, Tokyopop, found themselves flatly rejected once Big West learned that Tokyopop had been in communication with Harmony Gold over the possibility of licensing Macross 7 Trash. Now that Big West owns the Macross trademarks in much of the world, Harmony Gold has nothing they can offer Big West in the way of enticements except for a final show of capitulation and the extinction of the Robotech franchise to pave the way for Macross's reentry into the US market. That might even be an attractive option for HG's side, now that Robotech is once again dead and unlikely to make any kind of a comeback.

glitterboy2098 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

mech798 wrote:

ESalter wrote:

So you're saying

• HG had no right to the Macross trademarks,
• but was given them anyway,
• but still can't use them in film productions?

Do I understand that correctly?
I guess that's all possible, but it seems rather complicated.

HG wasn't given the MAcross trademarks. They independently registered them in the US and other markets, the US gives precedence to first registration to a trademark, while other nations consider who had the right to register that trademark.
That's why HG has been consistently losing that trademark right in other nations. Tatsanuko only had the right to license the direct animation, and nothing more, and thus HG was claiming broad rights regarding an intellectual property that they did not, in fact have--as the courts in most of the rest of the world have agreed. That's why they've been losing.

But didn't Tatsunoko have international merchandising rights WRT SDFM? And don't merchandising rights necessarily include trademark rights? (That's the whole point of trademarks, after all.)

actually, no.
while they thought they had them at the time, the agreement with StudioNue/BigWest was for distribution of the footage of the show only. no merchandise or design trademarks. the agreement's wording was unspecific though thus why Tatsunoko thought they had the rights to license out the whole package, and why the legal fight between the two took until the 2000's to sort out in japan. This is one of the reasons that the trademarks have been overturned in other countries, with StudioNue/BigWest conducting lawsuits to exert their claim to the trademarks over the HG/Tatsunoko invalid ones.

But wouldn't a licensee necessarily need at least a rudimentary trademark right? Otherwise it couldn't even advertise its license.

Nope. Not how trademark works.

ESalter wrote:But wouldn't a licensee necessarily need at least a rudimentary trademark right? Otherwise it couldn't even advertise its license.

Nope... there is no actual obligation for a company to trademark a potentially trademark-able word or phrase they're using in their business, nor is there any obligation to apply for official registration of that trademark to obtain the full legal protections under trademark law.

Most of the time, if a company is using a potentially trademark-able term or phrase, they'll at least tag it as an unregistered trademark with the ™ symbol, indicating that is is a mark and gaining a very limited form of protection under common law without going to the time and expense of officially registering a trademark. Only registered trademarks are tagged with ®.

You don't need to trademark a term to use it... it's actually the other way around. You need to be actively using the term in order for it to be eligible for trademark protections and you need to continue using it to retain that trademark protection. If you stop using it, eventually (it varies by jurisdiction) the trademark protections expire. In the US, a trademark that is unused for five years is considered "dead" and loses its protections.

Seto wrote:First and foremost (because I can get a meme out of it), it wouldn't happen because The Cake is a Lie. No western movie adaptation of an anime series has ever turned a profit at the box office. To date, the most successful attempts - Alita: Battle Angel and Ghost in the Shell - managed to earn back their production budgets but still fell tens of millions of dollars short of breaking even once the advertising budgets were included in the total. Big West isn't likely to be enticed by the promise of a share of the profits from a film that is all but completely guaranteed to finish in the red.

There maybe one factor that could make RT/Macross a more profitable result, that in terms of merchandizing (the examples of GitS and Alita really did not have that going for them, unlike say Star Wars or the Transformers franchises).

Though I have to say I find the possibility of a Robotech Live Action Movie very unlikely for a few reasons even before the rights issue:
1. What amounts to a rehash of an existing story from the show will be difficult IMHO in terms of cutting it up due to the length of the story (even at the saga stage, never mind the entire 85ep story).
2. Robotech as a brand wouldn't have the clout to get green lit out of the box for a multi-movie series like the MCU or the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the sequel "trilogy" or Lord of the Rings to name a few examples. So while you could set up for a sequel there is no guarantee it would be made (case in point wasn't Transformers: the last knight supposed to be a part 1 movie to be concluded later?).
3. The easiest RT arc to set a LA Movie in would be a post-series one, possibly a between the sagas, since it would avoid a lot of the baggage inherent. It is also the most potentially risky to make as opposed to a Macross setting (due to is popularity), but also gets back to the point that Sony could just do their own setting w/o RT's baggage.
4. HG itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't HG control of RT an issue with (I want to say Funimation) someone who was willing to develop the TSC series (or was it some other RT animated project) in the past (want to say circa 15 years ago) as a reason it didn't get made.
5. Robotech comes with baggage. Not just the rights/design aspect, but potential customers who have been soured by past experiences with Robotech/HG. How many Macross or Battletech fans might go, not going to see (or pay to see) the movie because of HG/RT hold on their respective properties, or the RRT kick-starter funders, etc. In Customer Service 1 bad customer is not one bad customer, it is viewed as 10 (or more). How do you convince these people that might ordinarily be customers but won't be due to this baggage to come and give it a try even inspite of said baggage? (Yes I realize not everyone is a potential customer for a given movie, but if they ordinarily would see a generic type of movie genre like this then it is an issue).

ShadowLogan wrote:There maybe one factor that could make RT/Macross a more profitable result, that in terms of merchandizing (the examples of GitS and Alita really did not have that going for them, unlike say Star Wars or the Transformers franchises).

Both Star Wars's recent efforts and Transformers had substantial merchandising empires established well before their recent movies with the support of their casual fans and the die-hard toy collector crowd.

Ghost in the Shell and Alita: Battle Angel didn't have that built-in advantage. Robotech is much worse off than either of them, both because it's considerably more obscure than either of those icons of the 90's anime/manga boom and because it can't use the iconic Japanese Macross designs currently propping up its barely-there merchandising efforts.

ShadowLogan wrote:Though I have to say I find the possibility of a Robotech Live Action Movie very unlikely for a few reasons even before the rights issue:
1. What amounts to a rehash of an existing story from the show will be difficult IMHO in terms of cutting it up due to the length of the story (even at the saga stage, never mind the entire 85ep story).

Not to mention all of the legal problems that would come from needing to write around intellectual property and trademarks owned by other (hostile) parties.

ShadowLogan wrote:2. Robotech as a brand wouldn't have the clout to get green lit out of the box for a multi-movie series like the MCU or the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the sequel "trilogy" or Lord of the Rings to name a few examples. So while you could set up for a sequel there is no guarantee it would be made (case in point wasn't Transformers: the last knight supposed to be a part 1 movie to be concluded later?).

Robotech as a brand doesn't even have the clout to get new animation work green-lit by Harmony Gold, and Harmony Gold owns it.

The idea that Sony is going to green-light a Robotech movie is... well... pretty silly and unrealistic, to say the least.

Worrying about a potentially-unfulfilled sequel hook is a bit premature when it's profoundly unlikely that there'll ever be a movie to put the sequel hook in.

(Yes, Transformers: the Last Knight had an unfulfilled sequel hook... but it was also the unsuccessful fifth film in a multi-billion dollar franchise so nobody at Paramount was exactly weeping over it, especially after a successful reboot in Bumblebee.)

ShadowLogan wrote:3. The easiest RT arc to set a LA Movie in would be a post-series one, possibly a between the sagas, since it would avoid a lot of the baggage inherent. It is also the most potentially risky to make as opposed to a Macross setting (due to is popularity), but also gets back to the point that Sony could just do their own setting w/o RT's baggage.

But that would make having seen the series a prerequisite to the live-action movie... which is a sure-fire recipe for failure unless the series is a hit TV series that's currently airing.

It'd be an especially stupid move now that Big West is positioned to effectively shut down distribution of the Robotech TV series itself in a majority of markets using the trademarks it recovered in court in the UK, EU, China, and Australia.

ShadowLogan wrote:4. HG itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't HG control of RT an issue with (I want to say Funimation) someone who was willing to develop the TSC series (or was it some other RT animated project) in the past (want to say circa 15 years ago) as a reason it didn't get made.

You're probably thinking of Robotech II: the Sentinels. Harmony Gold co-developed plans for that series with Tatsunoko Production, and Carl Macek's arrogant and incredibly misguided belief that he knew better than some of the anime industry's most celebrated writers, designers, and animators incl. Macross and MOSPEADA writer Sukehiro Tomita delayed the start of production and led to a lot of wasted effort, expensive rework, and staffing changes that the project simply couldn't afford. The project was already on the ropes even before the show's financial backer bailed and the exchange rate crash administered the coup de grace.

(Really, Robotech fans don't understand what a breathtaking display of total incompetence on Carl Macek's part Sentinels was. That was the one and only time Robotech had access to some of the very finest talent in the anime industry, and Macek didn't just squander the opportunity... he hassled those creators until they quit and replaced them with talentless nobodies he recruited, wasting time and a lot of the project's money in the process.)

Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles had some "attitude control" problems too, but those were in post-production. After completing the first (and only) OVA episode, Harmony Gold initially failed to find anyone willing to distribute their new title because they went into it with what can only be called a "rockstar attitude". They were so convinced it was going to be the next big thing that they went and annoyed prospective distributors by making unreasonable demands and priced themselves out of the market. It took a while for their egos to deflate enough to make more reasonable requests to the few distributors still willing to talk to them, which led to Funimation eventually picking it up for a relatively modest sum.

ShadowLogan wrote:5. Robotech comes with baggage. Not just the rights/design aspect, but potential customers who have been soured by past experiences with Robotech/HG. How many Macross or Battletech fans might go, not going to see (or pay to see) the movie because of HG/RT hold on their respective properties, or the RRT kick-starter funders, etc. In Customer Service 1 bad customer is not one bad customer, it is viewed as 10 (or more). How do you convince these people that might ordinarily be customers but won't be due to this baggage to come and give it a try even inspite of said baggage? (Yes I realize not everyone is a potential customer for a given movie, but if they ordinarily would see a generic type of movie genre like this then it is an issue).

Eh... IMO, Harmony Gold's bad karma is a much bigger obstacle for trying to get approval to make a movie than it would be for a movie once it came out.

Studio execs looking at the brand's reception in its native industry are naturally going to have some serious misgivings about investing in Robotech at all when they notice that the overwhelming majority of feedback related to Robotech is negative. Not just from the far more numerous fans of the various other franchises that Robotech has inconvenienced like fans of Macross, MechWarrior, and Transformers, but also its own fanbase. The last three attempts to continue the Robotech animated series were ended in failure in part or entirely because of a very negative response from Robotech's own fans, with Robotech 3000 basically having been booed out of FanimeCon, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles having been so poorly received its fan backlash destroyed not only the OVA but the fan community on the official website, and Robotech Academy tanking on Kickstarter. Factor in the outrage that swirled around the Robotech RPG Tactics fiasco and Titan's Robotech comics being widely ridiculed for their terrible writing and appalling tracing-heavy art style that frequently crossed the line into unintentional hilarity, and it's not hard at all to see why the Robotech live action movie proposal has languished in pre-development hell for fourteen years and counting.

@Seto
While I would agree TF and SW go in with a merchandising empire behind them, my point is that when a Movie comes out it kicks it into high gear compared to an off-year(s). While Alita or GitS may not have the advantage of Hasbro/Disney, I do not really recall any big marketing push to support them when they came out (aside from a trailer), and I recall a bigger marketing push for the original Jurassic Park movie in the '93. That lack of support might have been one of the big reasons they did not do as well financially.

Seto wrote:But that would make having seen the series a prerequisite to the live-action movie... which is a sure-fire recipe for failure unless the series is a hit TV series that's currently airing.

Does it really though. If its properly setup and executed detailed knowledge of a TV series (or previous movies) as a pre-req. wouldn't be necessary and could be handled by the narrative itself to bring viewers upto date on the things that are relevant to know from those precursors.

Seto wrote:You're probably thinking of Robotech II: the Sentinels....

No, I am pretty sure this was a post-2001 reset thing that was separate from Sentinels. I'm pretty sure on the time frame (circa 15 years ago), which would mean it isn't Sentinels (circa 35years ago) and in that time frame Funimation was involved with RT distribution. I remember it got squashed because HG did not want to give up (too much) control, which doesn't seem like the reasons often branded about for Sentinels being canceled. Maybe it was a rumor on the RT.com forums (not like HG would put something like this in the news section).

ShadowLogan wrote:@Seto
While I would agree TF and SW go in with a merchandising empire behind them, my point is that when a Movie comes out it kicks it into high gear compared to an off-year(s). While Alita or GitS may not have the advantage of Hasbro/Disney, I do not really recall any big marketing push to support them when they came out (aside from a trailer), and I recall a bigger marketing push for the original Jurassic Park movie in the '93. That lack of support might have been one of the big reasons they did not do as well financially.

Those movies were aimed at very different audiences despite all three of them being PG-13.

Ghost in the Shell and Alita: Battle Angel were mainly serious dramas that were aimed more or less exclusively at adult audiences. That's not a market that's conducive to toy sales or most other common forms of movie merchandising. Jurassic Park, on the other hand, was rewritten extensively to take the story away from the original novel's sci-fi/horror roots and give it more of a standard action/adventure flavor to make it lighter, softer, and more accessible to younger viewers to grab kids in that age group where they're just all about dinosaurs. Merchandising isn't counted in the box office gross, so it's not really part of the metric I was talking about, but I don't think the lack of merchandising was a significant factor. After all, there have been anime adaptations that had a decent-sized merchandising push behind them (like Dragonball Evolution and Speed Racer) which still flopped regardless.

If any one factor is to blame for the failures of live-action anime adaptations, it's the writing every time.

Anime writing doesn't adapt gracefully to live action filmmaking in general, but the writers working on Hollywood adaptations in particular never seem to actually understand the source material and in most cases either abandon the original story entirely or attempt to completely change the genre of the story in the adaptation. When the Wachowskis made Speed Racer, they tried to change an anime that was all about motorsports into a character drama about high-level corruption in the sport and the identity of the Masked Racer/Racer X[sup]1[/sup] and focused on literally anything except the actual racing that the original Mach GoGoGo was about. Dragonball Evolution was... let's just say that the entire movie was a mistake and talk no more about it. After casting went and put Scarlett Johansson in the role of an ethnically Japanese woman by the very Japanese name of Motoko Kusanagi living and working in Japan for the Japanese government as a part of the Japanese Public Security Intelligence Agency Section 9, the writers and director of Ghost in the Shell apparently felt compelled to spend roughly of half the movie frantically trying to explain away the poor judgement that led to whitewashing one of the most famous Japanese women in anime with a badly-written original subplot that completely derailed the story they were trying to adapt. The news the film had cast a white woman to play a Japanese character also drew fire from many corners even before the film came out, hurting its prospects even more. Alita: Battle Angel tried to adapt the slow-burn, atmospheric character drama of Gunnm into an action movie, cutting out most of the actual story and character development and massively oversimplifying the setting in favor of an attempt to race through the key events of the first manga's first four volumes, making the film feel like the Greatest Story Sparknotes Ever Told while completely missing what made Gunnm an icon of anime in the first place. (Its hideous, uncanny-valley visual design didn't help either.)

ShadowLogan wrote:

Seto wrote:But that would make having seen the series a prerequisite to the live-action movie... which is a sure-fire recipe for failure unless the series is a hit TV series that's currently airing.

Does it really though. If its properly setup and executed detailed knowledge of a TV series (or previous movies) as a pre-req. wouldn't be necessary and could be handled by the narrative itself to bring viewers upto date on the things that are relevant to know from those precursors.

Kinda, yeah... a lot of properties with way better name recognition than Robotech have tried this one and failed.

Even properties as big as Star Trek have tripped themselves up attempting this with the first J.J. Abrams soft reboot movie requiring you to have read a limited edition comic book to understand huh??? was going on in half of its plot, and I know you remember what happened the last time Robotech tried it because we were both there!

There's a limit to how much "as you know" narration you can get away with in a two-hour film... especially if it's not being marketed directly to fans like an OVA is.

ShadowLogan wrote:

Seto wrote:You're probably thinking of Robotech II: the Sentinels....

No, I am pretty sure this was a post-2001 reset thing that was separate from Sentinels. I'm pretty sure on the time frame (circa 15 years ago), which would mean it isn't Sentinels (circa 35years ago) and in that time frame Funimation was involved with RT distribution. I remember it got squashed because HG did not want to give up (too much) control, which doesn't seem like the reasons often branded about for Sentinels being canceled. Maybe it was a rumor on the RT.com forums (not like HG would put something like this in the news section).

[/quote]
I vaguely recall a rumor like that, but not in connection with Funimation... it was one of the borderline conspiracy theories that a certain someone (I'm sure you remember who) liked to dispense about the failed Robotech 3000 series concept. I forget the exact details, but it was something about staff at Netter Digital making a play for more creative control over the series and getting into a big fight that allegedly ended in Jason Netter (the studio owner/namesake and producer for the show) laying off portions of the staff and the project being derailed. I don't recall him ever having had any evidence behind that one, though.

There were a lot of weird rumors doing the rounds during the development of Shadow Chronicles, though. The only one that really stuck with me, apart from the quasi-true one about it being a continuation of Sentinels, was the one about them changing the title from "Shadow Force" to "Shadow Chronicles" because of an RPG group on the official forums that had been using that name ("Shadow Force") for a couple years before the OVA was announced.




1. This was, perhaps, the single stupidest part of the movie... spending a good quarter of the film on faking a bait-and-switch with respect to Racer X's identity. In the original, the identity of the Masked Racer bordered on being the Un-Reveal since it was stupidly obvious from the outset he was connected to the Mifunes and wore a racing suit with the Mach team's logo on it, and unmasked himself in his very first appearance to admit he was the Go's older brother. They basically tried to stretch a subplot from a 22 minute episode into over a quarter of a feature film.

You are right that writing (this especially seems lacking in Hollywood lately) and cast choices can make a difference, but so can other factors like release date, merch, promotion, your target audience.

Seto wrote:There's a limit to how much "as you know" narration you can get away with in a two-hour film... especially if it's not being marketed directly to fans like an OVA is.

That is also why I said "IF", its a pretty big if I admit especially with HG involved given their track record. The "as you know" narration doesn't have to be perfect, but good enough to get one situated which I think is doable (futuristic setting movies have to do something similar all in all respects).

Seto wrote:I vaguely recall a rumor like that, but not in connection with Funimation...

Maybe it wasn't Funimation but another partner, I don't remember the specifics beyond what I've said. Funimation might have been my mental filler-in because they where the distribution partner at the time as I was drawing a blank on who.

Seto Kaiba wrote:

ShadowLogan wrote:Studio execs looking at the brand's reception in its native industry are naturally going to have some serious misgivings about investing in Robotech at all when they notice that the overwhelming majority of feedback related to Robotech is negative. Not just from the far more numerous fans of the various other franchises that Robotech has inconvenienced like fans of Macross, MechWarrior, and Transformers, but also its own fanbase. The last three attempts to continue the Robotech animated series were ended in failure in part or entirely because of a very negative response from Robotech's own fans, with Robotech 3000 basically having been booed out of FanimeCon, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles having been so poorly received its fan backlash destroyed not only the OVA but the fan community on the official website, and Robotech Academy tanking on Kickstarter. Factor in the outrage that swirled around the Robotech RPG Tactics fiasco and Titan's Robotech comics being widely ridiculed for their terrible writing and appalling tracing-heavy art style that frequently crossed the line into unintentional hilarity, and it's not hard at all to see why the Robotech live action movie proposal has languished in pre-development hell for fourteen years and counting.

Refresh me on that--that was when they essentially banned anyone who didn't say that Shadow Chronicles was really good? I wasn't very active at that point, and all I recall was more or less not seeing the forums anymore when I did decide to see what was up.

mech798 wrote:Refresh me on that--that was when they essentially banned anyone who didn't say that Shadow Chronicles was really good? I wasn't very active at that point, and all I recall was more or less not seeing the forums anymore when I did decide to see what was up.

Yeah, Harmony Gold's creative staff initially laughed off the criticism of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles when they did their little arthouse movie theater tour.[sup]1[/sup] Once a majority of the fanbase had actually seen the film, the overwhelmingly negative reaction Harmony Gold got swiftly became a huge problem. Their attempt to contain it by insisting that only "constructive criticism" was allowed got twisted by certain volunteer moderators into a total ban on criticism of any kind.[sup]2[/sup] It caused some issues higher up too, though. Harmony Gold's management was noted to have been all kinds of PO'd about the film's reception since, in exchange for financing it, they'd been promised that it was a guaranteed hit, that it was going to grow the fanbase, make Robotech into an actual player in mainstream anime, and attract investors to fund future installments.[sup]3[/sup] There was also some noise from the volunteer mods who were close to Tommy that Harmony Gold was worried that the fanbase's harsh criticism and overall negative view of the film would hurt Robotech's prospects with Warner Bros.




1. "Laughed off" in a fairly literal sense, with Tommy actually catching flak from some quarters for joking about the lonely/horny Korean animators in connection with the designs of the female characters and tons of fans not noticing it was self-depreciating humor.

2. Their bizarre argument was that criticizing the movie was somehow tantamount to a personal attack on Tommy Yune.

3. Failure to make good on these promises was what prompted Harmony Gold's management to withdraw funding for future installments, earning the OVA a de facto cancellation only a few months after its home video release.

Seto Kaiba wrote:Studio execs looking at the brand's reception in its native industry are naturally going to have some serious misgivings about investing in Robotech at all when they notice that the overwhelming majority of feedback related to Robotech is negative. Not just from the far more numerous fans of the various other franchises that Robotech has inconvenienced like fans of Macross, MechWarrior, and Transformers, but also its own fanbase. The last three attempts to continue the Robotech animated series were ended in failure in part or entirely because of a very negative response from Robotech's own fans, with Robotech 3000 basically having been booed out of FanimeCon...

Wasn't the failure due to the poor quality animation compared to the original series? Which wouldn't be relevant to a completely original project. And the fact that Sony purchased the rights over a decade after Robotech 3000 means they weren't worried.

Seto Kaiba wrote:...Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles having been so poorly received its fan backlash destroyed not only the OVA but the fan community on the official website,...

Shadow Chronicles suffered from poor animation and writing; neither is relevant to an original production with a new producer. And Sony purchased the movie rights years after Shadow Chronicles' release.

Seto Kaiba wrote:...and Robotech Academy tanking on Kickstarter.

Sony acquired the Robotech rights after the kickstarter was cancelled.

Seto Kaiba wrote:Factor in the outrage that swirled around the Robotech RPG Tactics fiasco and Titan's Robotech comics being widely ridiculed for their terrible writing and appalling tracing-heavy art style that frequently crossed the line into unintentional hilarity...

Titan's original Robotech series ran for over two years, and was collected. Would Sony really consider it a failure?

Seto Kaiba wrote:...and it's not hard at all to see why the Robotech live action movie proposal has languished in pre-development hell for fourteen years and counting.

Many movies have been in "development hell"; that's why the term exists.

"Titan's original Robotech series ran for over two years, and was collected. Would Sony really consider it a failure?"

Considering the low print run counts along side the fact it wasn't well drawn or written with a follow up that was just as poorly drawn and written and essentially canceled, yes, failure is the proper term.

ESalter wrote:Wasn't the failure due to the poor quality animation compared to the original series?

While the animation quality was certainly poor, the primary source of discontent was that the animation was not being produced in the same style as the original series.

ESalter wrote:Shadow Chronicles suffered from poor animation and writing; [...]

It certainly did.

ESalter wrote:Titan's original Robotech series ran for over two years, and was collected. [...]

Which, as achievements for a publisher specializing in low-volume tie-in comics marketed to existing fandoms , is only marginally more impressive than "got out of bed". It's also worth noting that the continuation got cancelled after it'd barely started.

ESalter wrote:Would Sony really consider it a failure?

Realistically? Yes. Sony would consider all of those things, and the Robotech franchise itself, to be failures.

The reason these past failures matter to Sony, even though they picked up the rights later on, is that information about the franchise's past performance offers guidance for a directional estimate about how the prospective audience for a hypothetical Robotech movie might receive it. Contrary to the adage, past performance really is a pretty good indicator of future results. A property which has been met with great success is likely to continue to succeed, while a property that has repeatedly failed is not likely to do anything other than continue to fail. If a property is well-known and respected that bodes well for the live action movie's prospects. If a property is obscure or, worse, hated it'll have significant ramifications for a live action movie. The last thing you want is to have your audience actively avoid your big expensive movie because you adapted a property that audiences are actively put off by. You might want to dismiss these things as being in the past, but they're going to be part of Sony's math when they start working out a Robotech movie's odds of success. The data doesn't paint a pretty picture, to say the least.

ESalter wrote:Sony acquired the Robotech rights after [...]

To be blunt, that Sony acquired the rights means VERY little.

Hollywood studios buy up the rights to properties simply to have them all the time. Some might get made into movies or TV shows, but most simply languish in the studio's catalog of licenses until the rights expire. These rights are not expensive at all. Often costing just tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand dollars at most for exclusive control of the property for years at a time. Only major established properties and break-out hit properties that can command princely sums in the millions or tens of millions of dollars, like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, George R.R. Martin's late and unlamented Game of Thrones. Normally, this kind of buying of rights happens at a low level all the time but certain events can trigger buying sprees. The shutdowns caused by COVID-19 in many markets caused the cost of licenses to drop considerably, prompting a buying spree that lasted for most of last year. More commonly, when one studio has a breakout hit other studios will buy up the rights to related stories "just in case" to deny them to each other or keep one in the quiver in case the opportunity arose. 99.9% of them never see the light of day, and when the rights expire they're abandoned. There are whole companies that exist just to facilitate this, like HG's now-defunct one-time partner Kew Media Group.

Looking at it rationally, the reason that Warner Bros and Sony expressed interest in Robotech has nothing to do with Robotech. It's all about what Robotech's contemporaries were, and who's making money on one of them. Specifically, it's because Robotech just so happened to be a contemporary of the Generation 1 Transformers cartoon. Paramount had licensed the right to adapt Transformers and rolled out its first movie in July 2007, where they neatly pocketed over a quarter of a billion dollars in profits from the box office alone. Naturally, other studios began to look at other properties in the same or closely related genres and from the same period. Clash of the GoBots was off the table because it's owned by Hasbro, who were in a licensing arrangement with Paramount, and so was G.I. Joe. Robotech, however, was a free agent and its valuation was comically low after the disappointing reception that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles had received and its overall poor performance. The rights would've been dirt cheap, like the Robotech license always is.

The fact that this has dragged on for 14 years without a single actual person being officially connected to the project is a pretty reliable indicator that there are no plans to make the movie. No actual press releases from Sony or even Harmony Gold. No genuine reportage in the industry press. Just the occasional puff piece every few years that so and so was talked to about the film, followed by a rumor that they were attached to project that turns out to be false.

Hell... the Big News from Sony at this year's Wondercon Robotech panel was that Sony has nothing to announce and Harmony Gold was given the OK to continue to license merchandise for the animated Robotech TV series.

Considering that, as per Harmony Gold's own statements, they were supposed to abandon the animated series in favor of the live action movie being the future of Robotech, that's kind of a quiet admission of defeat right there. "Go ahead and continue investing in your dead-end property, we don't care."

jaymz wrote:If it matters, I independently do stuff -shrug-

That's what I do. People have fond memories of the TV-cartoon and enjoy it; I liked it, but I never really got into the characters; I really only liked Robotech with the RPG that had potential to be different things.

https://www.lacapital.com.ar/escenario/ ... 25479.html

¿Es un porteño? ¡q un boludo! Esta viviendo en nubes de pedos.

Evidently there's been a major breakthrough in negotiations between Big West and HG. It's reported that HG will stop opposing worldwide distribution of Macross media and properties, while Big West affirms their right to the Tatsanuko properties they used. in addition, Big West will not oppose distribution of a live action film outside of Japan. From what I saw, it doesn't say if they can put derivative bits of the Macross saga in a new production, but the other terms of the agreement seem to indicate that at least at this point, HG and Big West have settled a lot of their beefs and thus, negotiation on that last would probably be much more likely to be fruitful.

I wonder what sparked this? Big West was winning the trademark debate, but equally, it was costing them money, so I wonder if both sides decided a negotiated agreement would be better.

I also wonder if the likely surge in purchases of various properties due to the hoped end of Covid put some pressure on all parties so they could get this done while there was time to take advantage of the restarting economies.