Andrew Lloyd Webber has charged that plans to turn his Phantom of the
Opera and Cats into motion pictures have been shelved by
Warner Bros. and Universal, respectively.
“Antonio Banderas wants to do
Phantom,” he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “but
you’ll have to ask Warner Bros. about that. They don’t seem to get it,
but they won’t give the rights back to me. Unfortunately, our agreement
has no time line. I don’t know how we got ourselves into that.”
The
composer/producer said that he’s also trying to retrieve the rights to
Cats, too. “Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay and it has the cats
absolutely nailed,” he said. He noted, in fact, that some of the lines
that Stoppard wrote for the movie version of Cats showed up in
his Shakespeare in Love. “They were too good to waste,” he said.
