*The* Avengers - Steed and Mrs Peel

[Ginandtonic]

Why thank you

Still a talking point, albeit it one that was started three years ago... but better late than never.

 

[diankra]

Well, Lonemagpie hasn't mentioned it, but the Best-Of-The-Lot black&white Rigg episodes have just turned up on freeview TV in the UK for the first time in 20-odd years, so it's worth a bounce in case anyone here is encountering them for the first time.
OT, I don't see a revival ever working: you [almost certainly] can't recreate Steed and Peel without Macnee and Rigg; you could just carry on the style - and then reinterprate that style - but you'd have to start out without Steed unless you rebooted and found an actor who could hit the ground running (Macnee took years to 'get' Steed into his final form), and so on.
You could maybe go back to the original idea of an ordinary-ish man who takes up fighting crime after crime hits him personally. But you probably couldn't call it The Avengers without a lawsuit from Marvel, and the Batman/DC lawyers might have a word as well...

 

[The Old Mixer]

Although if the Marvel movie is the worldwide blockbuster it's looking to be

Thanks for the heads-up that this was a necro-thread, Greg from three years in the past!

 

[Christopher]

You could maybe go back to the original idea of an ordinary-ish man who takes up fighting crime after crime hits him personally. But you probably couldn't call it The Avengers without a lawsuit from Marvel, and the Batman/DC lawyers might have a word as well...

Titles, at least generic enough ones like that, can be legally used by different publishers/filmmakers, as long as the things they're used for are clearly distinct from one another. Nobody can own a word like "avenger." They can trademark it, but that only means they're entitled to protection from someone else using it to compete with them directly. So if someone else wanted to make a movie or comic book about a team of superheroes called the Avengers, then they'd be in trouble; but using that title for a clearly distinct film or series about a pair of British secret agents should be fine. Especially since the TV series predates the Marvel comic by two years.

And you certainly can't copyright a premise as generic as "Person takes up crimefighting after personal tragedy." Heck, that describes at least half the action movies and superhero stories ever made.