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Watchmen, the violent, bestselling graphic novel of all time, has been billed as 'unfilmable' for more than 20 years.
Now a much-anticipated Hollywood version, cursed by the novel's British author, is at the centre of a legal row that could keep it out of the cinema well beyond its scheduled release date next March.
When Alan Moore wrote Watchmen with the American illustrator Dave Gibbons in 1986, he called it the 'Moby Dick of comics', and so it has proved.
The fantasy has obsessed fans and a series of film directors ever since.
The story has never been out of print and tells of an America peopled by troubled, tights-wearing superheroes and racked by Cold War angst.
Time magazine listed Watchmen as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
A series of failed attempts to bring the fantasy to the big screen have earned it a safe place on any list of 'the greatest films never made'. And now the film's director, Zack Snyder, whose blockbuster 300 came out last year, could be forced to hold on to his film adaptation while four major studios try to untangle a bitter dispute.
Warner Bros, the producer of Snyder's film, is the target of a lawsuit filed by 20th Century Fox, which claims it has original rights to the story, even though the project has also passed through the hands of Paramount and Universal on its path to the screen.
Part of Fox's legal strategy against Warner is thought to be the attempt to block Watchmen's theatrical release, claiming it would cause them substantial harm.
A trial date in early January has been set.
Rough cuts of Snyder's two-hour 50-minute film have already been shown to selected audiences. Sadly the reclusive Moore is not one of those hoping for a positive outcome.
In fact he has cursed Snyder's production from his home in the English town of Northampton, promising to 'spit venom all over it'.
Set in several time zones, Watchmen imagines an America that is still locked in the Cold War; a place where superheroes are commonplace.
Even Moore's other highly successful comic-style creations, which include The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, have failed to loom so large.
Moore, however, believes all his stories are best left in graphic novel form and he has refused to have his name on any film adaptations of his work.
Before Snyder, the director of Matrix, Joel Silver, and then the British-based director, Terry Gilliam, who made Brazil, had both hoped to make the film.
Next, the British director Paul Greengrass reworked a screenplay by David Hayter, writer of X-Men, for the third studio in the chain, Paramount, which had picked up the baton from Universal.
Greengrass began building sets, but concern about the script and the $100 million budget shut the production down in June 2005.
The central plank of the 20th Century Fox case is that Warner Bros has infringed its rights.
Warner, in turn, claims Fox is making an 'opportunistic' bid to grab a share of a hit. With the latest Batman outing, The Dark Knight, generating $1 billion in ticket sales, superhero stories are the ultimate honeypot.
