'March' madness o'seas

Warner's new-model waddle piques distribs' interest

By ALISON JAMES

The whole world is waddling. The big question is: Do you get American penguins or French ones?

With the U.S. success of "The March of the Penguins," distribs from around the globe are trying to get rights from Warner Independent.

But they're sitting on the wrong egg. Warner Independent only negotiated rights to the film in the U.S. and United Kingdom. Wild Bunch is selling rights in other territories -- to the French version of the pic, which is quite different.

Warner Independent has agreed to let Australian distrib Village Roadshow -- a production co-financing partner of Warner Bros. -- have its version, allowing the Oz distrib to put aside the French version it originally signed up for. But the film's Gallic producer Bonne Pioche says it will agree to the arrangement only if it receives a hefty fee.

Even before the bow of the U.S. version, Wild Bunch had set deals in numerous countries for the French version. While many of those territories are now interested in the American version, they'd have to do the unthinkable to land it: get a lot of French people to agree again to the changes made by WIP.

Before it re-edited, rescripted and recomposed the docu, Warner Indie was required under the French Moral Rights Clause to get approval by the pic's original writer, director, producers and composer. Any sale to new territories would require another such agreement.

So it's a question of moral rights -- and, of course, money.

When the Bonne Pioche-distribbed pic played in France, it scored an impressive 1.77 million admissions. But that version, with a more docu-fictional approach featuring the penguins' "thoughts" voiced by actors, didn't fare as well in Japan and Spain.

Warner Indie -- which also licensed rights to English-speaking Canada to Christal -- re-edited and rescored the film and added narration by Morgan Freeman. The pic has been a phenomenon Stateside -- $66 million and still counting, making it the highest- grossing French pic ever in the U.S.

Sometimes a territory has a choice of subtitled or dubbed versions of a pic, or both. But this is more complex. It's unlikely any territory would try to distribute the two versions.

"We're open to discussion, but any solution must be in everybody's interests," Bonne Pioche's Yves Darondeau tells Variety.

Perhaps all the parties could borrow a solution from reality TV fare such as "Big Brother" or "American Idol"/"Pop Idol," in which each territory reformats the property to its own local tastes. They could call it "Survivor: Antarctica."