[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joe Moore

They had to pay for those likeness rights. Just as they did for Weller's Alex Murphy likeness. and they apparently were not cheap.

Plus Jack Nicholson for Joker which apparently cost a small fortune from hear-say.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dolemite

So you can have the rights to make merchandise for certain movies, but that may not always include the actual likenesses of the actors themselves; in those instances, you'd have to work it out with the individual actors on a case-by-case basis (such as Michael J. Fox, etc). Correct?

Yup. Star Wars for example, George Lucas was clever and made all the actors include their likeness rights for the film in their contracts for merchandise. Alien and Predator on the other hand never made their actors do any such thing so NECA has to go actor to actor for rights. The crappy thing then is that acquiring an actor's likeness for use on one project doesn't necessarily grant use of the likeness for any and all projects the actor has been in, hence we got figures of Apollo Creed but not Dillon. Creatures such as the Alien or predators have no likeness to an actual person though so the rights to those are included with the license.