UPDATE -- Settlement announced!
"Disney settles royalties dispute with Star Wars Authors" by Jake Abbate 5.11.21
Excerpt: "Last fall, sci-fi novelist Alan Dean Foster made waves when he published an open letter claiming that Disney hasn’t been paying him royalties for his Star Wars and Alien books. His allegations caused an uproar throughout the fan community, and eventually got the hashtag #DisneyMustPay trending on social media. But now, the studio is finally taking steps to make things right. According to the #DisneyMustPay task force (via BleedingCool), Disney has agreed to compensate not just Foster, but other unpaid writers as well....
...“Lee Goldberg, IAMTW, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America bring valuable experience to the Disney Task Force,” said Kowa in a statement. “Their support demonstrates that writers stand with each other.”
“Since we launched the Task Force, progress has been made,” added Kowal. “We are pleased that a few writers have been paid. However, we do notice the difference in how the lower profile writers are being treated. We should not still be having the discussion about honoring their contracts.”
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Back in November 2020, stories began surfacing that well known sci fi author Alan Dean Foster was in dispute with Disney over non-payment of royalties. For decades, Foster had received a reliable stream of royality payments for his popular novelizations of films. He wrote novelizations for the Star Wars series at Lucasfilm and the Alien series at Fox. The legal case is still unfolding.
In a nutshell, the legal argument by Disney is that they have acquired assets from their purchases of Lucasfilm and Fox, but not liabilities under contract to these companies.
Say what?
Next two photos by Caitlin O'Hara from Wall Street Journal article listed later in the post.
This photo shows Foster holding his personal copy of his novelization, autographed by Lucas and others.
Foster's case first came to light when he contacted the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SWFA). https://www.sfwa.org/about/who-we-are/
The SWFA is a non-profit organization to "promote, advance, and support science fiction and fantasy writing in the United States and elsewhere, by educating and informing the general public and supporting and empowering sciecne fiction and fantasy writers.
You can read the SWFA blog post about the Foster vs. Disney case here: https://www.sfwa.org/2020/11/18/disney-must-pay/
This story is an important case study. It has been picked up by several news sources. Here are some links and excerpts.
Wall Street Journal "Star Wars Novelists Seek Years of Missing Royalty Payments From Disney"by Erich Schwartzel. 12.18.20 https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-wars-novelists-seek-years-of-missing-royalty-payments-from-disney-11608393600?st=
Excerpt: "Alan Dean Foster was in his late 20s when George Lucas, standing near a model of the Millennium Falcon in a warehouse in Southern California, met him to discuss writing the novel adaptation of his forthcoming movie “Star Wars.”
The original contract called for an upfront payment of $7,500, until Mr. Lucas tossed Mr. Foster a 0.5% royalty on sales that Mr. Foster, now 74 years old, says added up to several times that initial payment. They arrived several times a year as the original 1977 blockbuster set box-office records and the novelization he wrote went on to sell more than one million copies.
Then, in 2012, Walt Disney Co. bought Lucasfilm Ltd.—and the royalty checks stopped.
Now, Mr. Foster and other authors from Disney -purchased franchises are in a heated dispute with Hollywood’s biggest empire, which they say refuses to pay royalties on book contracts it absorbed in the $4 billion Lucasfilm deal and other acquisitions. The amount of money at stake is minuscule to a company of Disney’s size but important to the writers seeking it. While Disney has mined Lucasfilm for new movies that have collectively grossed nearly $6 billion at the world-wide box office, these writers say the company has delayed dealing with their complaints and stiffed them on checks that rarely total a few thousand bucks apiece.
Since Mr. Foster’s dispute was taken public by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, other authors of books tied to projects from Indiana Jones to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” have come forward with similar stories of royalty checks that stopped after Disney acquired the properties. In each case, Disney threatens to alienate an obscure but vital tentacle of the franchises, as these novelizations helped build and maintain fan loyalty. Complicating matters: The exact amount of money at stake is unknown, since sales and royalties for the books involved have fluctuated wildly over time."
Here's a Nov 2020 interview with Foster and SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal
Polygon.com "A Star Wars Writer Claims Disney Isn't Paying Royalities -- but the issues are tricky" by Andrew Liptak. 12.16.20
Excerpt: "This November, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a professional organization for genre authors, dropped a bombshell announcement that shook the science fiction community: For several years, author Alan Dean Foster had been trying, without success, to get paid for several major tie-in novels adapting movies from the Star Wars and Alien franchises. While Disney has kept the books in print with other publishers, with Titan handling Alien and Del Rey on Star Wars, Foster says he hasn’t received royalty payments for new editions. So, he had turned to SFWA for help, and the #DisneyMustPay hashtag was born.
According to SFWA, the incident sets troubling precedence for others in similar positions. If a publisher can get out of paying an author by having the license travel to another company, it could undermine the livelihoods of many writers who made their livings writing novelizations and tie-in novels for some of the biggest media franchises in existence. Moreover, since Foster and SFWA went public with their claim, other authors have spoken to Polygon to say that they too haven’t been paid for work now owned by Disney after the acquisitions of Lucasfilm in 2012 and 20th Century Fox in 2019.
On Nov. 12, 1976, a paperback novel called Star Wars, “written” by George Lucas, appeared on stands. With six months to go before the film would debut in theaters, Lucas’ company was hard at work licensing the property out to other companies that could produce shirts, toys, and comics that could promote the release. This included a pre-release novelization: Lucasfilm hired 29-year-old writer Alan Dean Foster to ghostwrite the book, as well as pen a sequel that could easily be spun into a second, lower-budget Star Wars film if the first underwhelmed at the box office. Foster had already been enjoying a career as a science fiction author, selling his first story to Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1971, and his first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, a year later. Armed with Lucas’ script and concept art, he produced a 272-page book in just six weeks. When it hit stores courtesy of Ballantine Books in 1976, few realized who had actually written the novel.
Still, after the success of Star Wars, Foster found himself a go-to person for movie novelizations. Over the years, he’s penned dozens of novelizations for franchises like Aliens, Star Trek, Dark Star, The Black Hole, Clash of the Titans, Outland, The Thing, Krull, The Last Starfighter, Starman, The Chronicles of Riddick, and others. They were all written in addition to his own original novels.
The nature of a work-for-hire contract means an author who’s written a tie-in novel will have little control over where their story ends up; how characters, situations, or details are used after they turn in their manuscript; and even the copyright of the work itself. It’s a tradeoff: Foster might not own the book, but the product may provide a steady revenue stream for years, especially if the franchise is popular with audiences. Write enough of them, and those tributaries will feed a healthy river.
Shortly after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox last year, Foster says that his royalties for his Alien novels stopped coming. He and his agent first attempted to resolve the issue with the book’s publisher, Warner Books. According to Foster’s agent Vaughn Hansen, while Foster and the organization were working to uncover the provenance of those rights, it became clear there were also missing payments for his Star Wars novels.
(Photo by Titan books)
Unable to resolve the issue directly, the pair took their complaint to SFWA’s Grievance Committee, a group within the organization that is designed to help authors who are having issues with their publishers. SFWA went to Titan Books, the publisher that currently publishes Foster’s Alien novels, and were told that they had to instead speak with the rightsholder: Disney. (Titan Books did not respond to comment for this story.) SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal tells Polygon that they attempted to resolve the situation by contacting the conglomerate, asking that the books be taken out of print until such time that payments to Foster resumed.
According to Kowal, Disney lawyers told SFWA that while it owned the underlying rights to Foster’s Alien novels, among others, holding the copyright did not obligate the company to pay him royalties — his contract was with Warner Books, not with 20th Century Fox or Disney. During SFWA’s November press conference, Kowal explained that the organization had trouble setting up a meeting with Disney to discuss and clarify the issue. Furthermore, Disney asked for their discussions to be kept confidential and that whatever they discussed couldn’t be used in further legal action. (Representatives for Disney declined to speak to Polygon on the record for this story.)
An insistence on confidentiality frustrated SFWA committee hoping to help Foster. “What they have said is that they acquired the rights and not the obligations,” Kowal tells Polygon. “We feel fairly confident that if we can talk to someone from the publishing arm of Disney, that they will understand how these things are supposed to work. And that much of this is probably just something that has happened during the process of acquisition, but we can’t get past their legal branch, which is making this completely ridiculous argument.”
Disney’s argument: it wasn’t obligated to pay royalties or provide royalty statements for the Alien novels because Foster had signed a contract with the publisher, Warner Books. And because Disney now owns the copyright to each of the novels, it can redirect them to whatever publisher it deems fit. Those involved with SFWA believe that Disney’s interpretation of copyright law isn’t accurate and that there are still obligations that carry over with Foster’s contracts. The situation with Foster’s Star Wars novels, now published by Del Rey, are a bit murkier. Foster originally signed a contract (which Polygon was able to review for this story) with the Star Wars Corporation, which guaranteed royalties for each book sold. The royalties continued when SWC became Lucasfilm in 1977. However, Foster, his agent, and SFWA say that they haven’t been paid since Disney acquired Lucasfilm."
The Verge.com "Star Wars Novelist Says Disney Won't Pay Him Royalities It Owes Him" by Elizabeth Lopatto. 11.19.20 https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21578621/disney-alan-dean-foster-royalties-copyright-law
Excerpt: Alan Dean Foster, author of several Star Wars novelizations, says Disney hasn’t paid him his royalties. According to Foster, Disney has also asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement before the company will speak with him.
“You continue to ignore requests from my agents,” Foster wrote in a letter published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. “You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me.”
Foster
ghost-wrote the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope, under the byline of
George Lucas; it was published in 1976 before the movie’s release. He also
published a sequel to Star Wars, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Disney acquired
Lucasfilm in 2012; according to Foster, Disney stopped paying him royalties.
Last year, Disney bought 20th Century Fox, acquiring the rights to some other
novelizations by Foster: Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3. Disney hasn’t paid Foster
a dime on any of the Alien books, he says."
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