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Battle Over ‘Watchmen’ Surrounds a Producer
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Visible through the glass door of the film producer Lawrence Gordon’s office here, a poster for his coming movie “Watchmen,” framed and ready for hanging, was propped against a wall this week.

Still to be determined: whether the black-and-yellow artwork, its distinctive happy face spattered with blood, will have some of its most important credits revised before joining Mr. Gordon’s crowded poster gallery.

A rapidly escalating legal fight between Warner Brothers, which has already shot “Watchmen,” and 20th Century Fox, which claims to own rights to the graphic novel on which it is based, is headed for trial in federal court in Los Angeles next January. That is just two months before Warner is scheduled to release the film in the United States, while Paramount Pictures distributes it abroad. (Legendary Pictures helped finance the film.)

The collision is extraordinary. Major studios have rarely if ever been known to sue each other over a $100 million-plus picture that has already wrapped.