Some Buffoons Bought a 'Dune' Book and Mistakenly Thought They Owned the IP
More like Jodorowsky's "Doom," am I right?
One of my favorite documentaries of all time is Jodorowsky's Dune, about the failed attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky to adapt Dune. Some of the lookbooks from that movie have been floating around Hollywood. One recently went to auction.
The assumption is that it would fetch $30,000 to $40,000—a high price, but a fair one for Hollywood history. What happened next was... unpredictable.
The bidding began and the price soared, fetching close to $3 million.
Were these just rabid Jodorowsky fans? No, they were an ether-backed collective known as TheSpiceDAO, and they had one goal for this purchase: make their own Dune. They tweeted their goals out with a plan for how to tackle this idea.
Here's the main problem... they can't do that.
Owning an expensive book means only that. You have the book. The rights to Dune lie with Warner Bros., who are deep in creating its own Dune franchise. And the studio would sue them into oblivion if they tried to circumvent that.
The gap in knowledge and understanding here is astounding.
There were some good intentions behind the idea—the collective wants to make the lookbook free online for people to check out.
But if they stopped to Google that idea, they'd learn that most, if not all of the book is online already. And free. You can look at it on OpenCulture right now.
While it's not totally complete, it's still free. I admire the effort into making knowledge free for all, but only if real efforts are made to understand the rights behind those things and the already available material.
It would be easy to continue dunking on these people, but instead, I'll address anyone or any collective with this much money. Change is not something you can buy. It takes action, forethought, and leadership. If you really want to disrupt a network or pathway, you have to find a new way in, not buy yourself through an old way. Use your cash to fund creatives and original ideas. Build out a studio that makes money, and then make more things. You could decentralize pitching and diversify Hollywood in so many ways.
But if you want to ignore all that and buy some big intellectual property, let me know, I've got an original copy of Harry Potter from 1997 to sell you.
