Citizen Kane TV reboot mired in lawsuits over rights disputes
The Citizen Kane televizion reboot looks dead in the water as producers and RKO Pictures battle it out in court over contract disagreements.
Citizen Kane, the film everyone’s heard of but nobody’s seen, is being remade for the small screen. Or it would be if a contract dispute hadn’t broken out between executive producer Keith Patterson and RKO Pictures. RKO owns the rights to the original film. They also own 50 percent of the rights to the new studio, KMT, that would be making the series.
According to Vanity Fair, the injunction filed against RKO pictures in the Supreme Court of New York basically says that the RKO people backed out of the contract at the last second. It also says they jerked Patterson around with sudden renegotiation and shady business practices. Basically once 90-year-old CEO Theodore Hartley kicks it, vice chair Mary Beth O’Connor gets to buy RKO and its intellectual properties for pennies. The suit also points out that O’Connor has a healthcare proxy for Hartly which is also pretty shady.
The KMT venture was originally going to remake a bunch of old films into TV series. It looks like all of those are now off the table. They might work things out, but for now it doesn’t look like it.
Citizen Kane is by many accounts the best film ever made. Notoriously rotund Orson Welles made his feature debut in the film. He wrote, directed, and starred in the Citizen Kane after several attempts at getting other films off the ground. The film didn’t initially do well in the box office, but got a lot of praise from critics, sparking a revival in the 1950s. Welles went on to win several awards throughout his career.
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Citizen Kane is available on Blu-Ray if you want to give it a watch. It’s really a good movie. It starts off pretty slow and is a bit dated, but the story is still timely. A media magnate succumbs to greed and the pursuit of power ultimately (spoiler alert) dying alone and regretful. There are people who could learn a thing or two from watching it.