Variety has yet another story on The Golden Compass and the question of whether Warner Brothers will go ahead with the rest of the His Dark Materials franchise, which began under the now-defunct team at New Line. The gist of it is that the franchise needs the overseas market to stay afloat, but the distributors who bought the overseas rights to the first film might have dibs on the sequels, too — and Warner doesn’t want to distribute any movies, but especially these ones, through any distributor other than Warner’s own overseas branches. The story doesn’t address whether, let alone how, the fate of this franchise might be affected by Warner’s recent decision to add an extra movie to the Harry Potter franchise or by the two-part adaptation of The Hobbit that may or may not get made; between those two franchises alone, Warner would be churning out five new big-budget fantasy flicks over the next four and a half years, and might not be interested in putting up the cash for even more high-priced effects-laden tentpoles — especially when the original film in this particular franchise was an iffier box-office performer than expected.
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