Booked it mean in entertainment11/30/2023 ![]() Option Fee. The option fee is the amount which the producer pays to acquire the exclusive option.Even if a producer is able to satisfy themselves that the author has the AV rights, it will be prudent to obtain from the publisher a quitclaim or release wherein the publisher confirms that they do not control the AV rights. Often the publisher of the book will have acquired the AV rights in their publishing contract with the author – but it certainly is not unusual for an author to have retained the AV rights. Who Owns the Rights? For the film producer, it is critical to ascertain who actually controls the right to make an audio-visual project based on the book (what I’ll refer to throughout this post as the “AV rights”).By entering into an option agreement, the producer is basically acquiring the right to go to potential investors and financiers of the movie and say “hey, I’ve got the exclusive right to make a movie based on this book – want to be a part of it?” Why are agreements structured as options? Because the producer usually needs time to make arrangements to actually finance the making of the movie – and while the producer is running around trying to gather the money to make the movie, they need to “secure” the exclusive rights in the book, so that the author doesn’t go and give the rights to some other producer. In other words, there are usually some conditions precedent which the producer needs to satisfy before they can actually go ahead and make the movie, the most important condition (from the author’s perspective) being the payment of a “purchase” price. What that means is that the producer has acquired not the exclusive right to make the movie, but has acquired the exclusive right to purchase the right to make the movie. ![]() Most often, the deal to make a movie based on a book takes the form of an exclusive “option” agreement. What are some of the considerations to be taken into account when structuring and negotiating an agreement to make a movie based on a book? As Torontonians know, we are in the midst of a mayoral election campaign in all the excitement surrounding the candidate debates, it may have slipped into the rearview mirror that last month it was announced that the film rights for Crazytown: the Rob Ford Story, Robin Doolittle’s bestselling book about Toronto’s current mayor, had been sold to a Toronto-based production company.
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