137th Gebirg wrote:
Not quite sure. We can use the 1+ year old Yamato live action movie from Japan as an example. It's been out for some time under Japanese publication in various formats (with relatively decent subtitles), but it has yet to be brought in under an American license. I'm not quite sure how long such things take with other properties, but lots of people in this thread keep mentioning the Disney license from the failed live-action script from many years ago (Arizona! God it was horrible!) - it is possible that there may be a difference in the way the licenses work (akin to BSG). That, plus the additional complexity of foreign import and copyright laws, likely muddy the issue even further. There was also the weird feud going on between Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Reiji Matsumoto over who owned the rights to Yamato to begin with, leading to some confusion between the canonical place of Nishizaki's "Yamato Resurrection" and Matsumoto's "Great Yamato/Great Galaxy" project in the Yamato universe. Then the Nish died (not long after being released from jail on an odd firearms charge) and I don't think anyone is quite sure who is authorized to sell the rights to an American publishing house. Is it the Nishizaki estate, or is it Matsumoto, or someone else entirely? I honestly don't know the exact details of the whole multi-corporate licensing mechanism, I'm just making a semi-educated guess based on the things I've seen/read/heard so far and my information may be woefully out of date.
Any way you cut it, it's messy...
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IIRC, Matsumoto lost out on that case (I think I read that on ANN), but I'm not sure if the Nishizaki estate actually has any rights to it or if the rights went wholesale to the Japanese studio.