For the past two years, a group of Redwall fans has attempted to produce a Redwall movie on their own - albeit with no legal permission from The Redwall Abbey Company, and thus a heinous violation of copyright and an infringement on Brian Jacques' intellectual property. It is illegal to produce/create movies using copyrighted material without proper licensing, even if you have no intention to profit off of it.
It is for these reasons that this project has never been linked on this website, and it will not be linked here even now, as we take copyright and legal issues very very seriously.
Thus you can imagine my relief this week when Alan Ingram on behalf of The Redwall Abbey Company contacted this group of people and informed them that film rights were not available, effectively halting all work on the project.
However, Mr. Ingram also noted in his e-mail that the Redwall Abbey Co. was in "contractual talks with another interested party," and that they were "close to reaching an agreement," which is incredibly positive news for a potential Redwall novel big screen adaptation, and I sincerely hope it all works out for the best for everyone involved.
Hopefully we will see a tale of Redwall at cinemas in the near future.
Update 8/21/2011:
The director of the fan project has sent me a statement:
"On behalf of the Mossflower Fan-Film project as the Director I'd just like to give my own statement on the Mossflower Film project.
We were not doing this project under the table, from day one we have been trying to acquire the rights for this film we began by sending mail to the business address which was responded to with a generic fan message that did not deal with our concerns; they gave us Redwall playing cards. We then tried a new approach, making many phone calls thoughout the U.S, U.K and Canada. We were finally given a working email address to Alan Ingram (the current legal guardian of the Redwall estate) We then contacted him seeking the rights for Mossflower. Alan Ingram declined our request to continue making the film (due to another studio already closing a deal on the film rights of the Redwall stories) We then shut down our project ourselves, so as not to do anything illegal as we now knew that the rights were unavailable now and hence followed the wishes of the Redwall Company and by assosiation Brian Jacques himself.
As for future projects we have some ideas in the works but nothing worth mentioning at this point as it is too early in development.
Thank you LordTBT for giving us this oppurtunity to represent our side of the story it means alot to us!"
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