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Jessica Rabbit's creator just got her rights back, and wants to make the movie Disney never would
Disney doesn't own the movie rights to Who Framed Roger Rabbit anymore - which means that Jessica Rabbit could be coming back to our screens in a way you wouldn't expect
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Good, if somewhat surprising, news for anyone who grew up watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the groundbreaking mix of live-action and animation that shaped imaginations and made cartoons cool with mainstream audiences when it was released back in 1988 — there’s now the very real possibility that a sequel could finally reach theaters… and it’s because Disney has surrendered the rights to the property.
The update comes from none other than Gary K. Wolf, who originally created the characters and concept of Toontown and the human/toon crossover world in his 1981 novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit. “I now have back the rights to all my characters, all my books. I can, basically, do my own Roger Rabbit projects,” he told fansite ImNotBad.com. “35 years after you have sold the rights to a book or [song], you could petition the Library of Congress and get those rights back. [An attorney] said to me, ‘You could get your rights back from Disney.’ I said, ‘There’s no way that’s possible.’” And yet — it was.
In fact, according to Wolf, it proved to be surprising easy. “I expected that this would be a contentious process. Who knows what was going to happen? But, it was not. It was very civil, very courteous, very straightforward,” he said. “Disney was always top-notch for me. They treated me very well. They always accommodated me in whatever I wanted to do.”
This doesn’t mean that Wolf now owns Who Framed Roger Rabbit the movie — that’s still Disney’s property. What he does own is the right to make new movies, or shows, or anything, based on the characters, and on his novels… and, it seems, that’s something that’s already in the works.
“The [project] that is most prominent … is a live-action Jessica Rabbit movie based on the book Jessica Rabbit: XERIOUS Business. That was the first project that we took a look at and the first we started developing. It’s probably the one that’s furthest along right now.”
Published in 2022, XERIOUS Business is a soft reboot of Jessica Rabbit as a character, reimagining her as a regular human called Jessica Krupnick who longs for a life of excitement, not knowing what she’s about to get herself into. As a way to relaunch Roger Rabbit on the big screen, it’s akin to rebooting Batman with Batman Begins — but the real question is, who could play a real life Jessica? Actresses, start polishing your resumes now.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is streaming on Disney+.
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