Though it has been nearly forty years since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” came out, the IP looks set to undergo something of a renaissance.
In a recent interview with ImNotBad.com, author Gary K. Wolf revealed that he quietly reacquired the rights to his Roger Rabbit creation last year:
“I now have back the rights to all my characters, all my books. I can, basically, do my own Roger Rabbit projects.”
Wolf was able to reclaim ownership through the 35-year copyright reversion clause that gives original creators the ability to reclaim rights to their original work after a period of 35 years.
The author says the process was pretty straightforward – especially as Disney did not try and stop the rights reversal from happening:
“I expected that this would be a contentious process. Who knows what was going to happen? But, it was not. It was very civil, very courteous, very straightforward. Disney was always top-notch for me. They treated me very well. They always accommodated me in whatever I wanted to do.”
Now that he controls the characters again, Wolf says he plans to reintroduce audiences to Roger Rabbit and other Toontown characters via multiple projects, including a live-action film adaptation of 2022 book “Jessica Rabbit: XERIOUS Business”:
“A lot of people have asked why didn’t we do the first movie more closely to the Who Censored Roger Rabbit book, with the word balloons and those kinds of characters. Well, that’s on the table.
The one that is most prominent … is a live-action Jessica Rabbit movie based on the book Jessica Rabbit: XERIOUS Business. That was the first project that we took a look at and the first we started developing. It’s probably the one that’s furthest along right now.”
That novel is essentially an origin story that reveals that Jessica Rabbit was originally a human named Jessica Krupnick before she became a Toon.
No studios or production companies are involved with any of his plans for now, but he says he’s open to working with Disney, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy or any of the others involved in the original film.
