If I were to tell the complete truth, I would say that there are three things I'm looking forward to this year: film versions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Road, and Watchmen. That's it. That's all of the anticipation I have right now (production companies will blame the writers, but I blame the production companies).

Anyway, this company known as 20th Century Fox is threatening one third of my joy. I'm fascinated by this notion that the Warner Bros. Watchmen will hurt Fox. I agree that Warner Bros. was silly and its lawyers lacking in their understanding of the rights Fox held for Watchmen. However, Fox's claim that the Warner Bros. movie will irreparably harm them is complete crap. Yes, they should get money for the movie; yes, they own the rights to it; but for a studio that had done nothing with the rights for a decade and had seemingly decided to ignore that they owned the rights to it, to claim that the film will irreparably harm them even if they get money, is shit.

There are only two tiny bits of potential truth to Fox's claim:

1) Watchmen turns out to be awesome and the masses realize that Warner Bros. is a much better production company and better serves difficult material; and the audience questions why Fox couldn't get it to work. This could damage Fox's reputation, but my understanding is that money rules Hollywood, and if Fox gets money for Warner Bros.' effort, why complain? No one goes to a movie because Warner Bros. or Paramount or Fox is involved, people go because they want to see the movie. And I doubt many movies go to one company over another because they did super on a movie years before.

2) Fox wins their argument, Watchmen isn't released, the movie is never seen, and the fans decide to boycott Fox. Unfortunately, this fury won't do much. A bunch of angry fans won't hurt a company. Because how many people are really going to be angry about the Watchmen case? What percentage of that mob is the movie-going public? The truth is that the fanboys and fangirls of the world are a notable group and they can make an opening day. They line up for movies days before. They are the loyal ones. But, if we're honest, they're only a fraction of the money a movie needs to bring in to be successful. A faction of angry Watchmen fans won't destroy Fox with a boycott, but they could destroy the Wolverine movie. The one thing you don't want to do is piss off the boys who could write about how cool your movie is, because if you blink, those boys could decide that your prequel isn't worth the effort, and your movie release two months after the expected Watchmen release date could just be pathetic.

Although, I'm not completely on Warner Bros.' side, because they're the assholes who postponed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.