Dreamworks Animation is on the verge of expanding their library of characters to include Casper the Friendly Ghost, Voltron, He-man, Gumby, Felix the Cat, and many more.
Classic Media holds character rights for dozens of characters but several of them are tangled together with other companies. Dreamworks has placed the highest bid, according to sources, at $150 million. It looks like they are the likely winner for the purchase, but that does not mean they will have a clear path to make movies using these well known characters.
Characters like Godzilla, Popeye, The Lone Ranger, and Where’s Waldo are owned by Classic Media for only specific purposes (DVD re-release, book reprint, etc) but not necessarily for theatrical use. This could mean that Dreamworks can try to negotiate use from the studios that do have projects in development or they can try and use the Classic Media rights to capitalize on other films.
I would think the logical move by Dreamworks Animation is for the countless properties in the Classic Media portfolio that they would have full rights to. Could we be seeing an animated MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE movie come out of this? Or even a big screen Gumby adventure? You can be sure that if this deal goes through, we will be seeing development news fairly quickly.
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