Last month (year) we reported that the upcoming Watchmen movie would be one of the most highly anticipated fanboy movies of 2009. Unfortunately recent reports seem to indicate that fanboys will just have to keep … on … antici … pating.

The movie rights to the Alan Moore graphic novel have been in the proverbial “development hell” since the Comic Con crowd first heard whispers of the possibility of a live-action interpretation. It seems the release of the movie – now completely shot and in what folks in the movie biz call “post production” – will be once again postponed over a lawsuit.

A federal judge ruled against Warner Brothers saying that Fox actually owns the rights to the movie. You figure a big company like Warner Bros. would make sure they had all the rights to a story before spending $120 million on making it into a movie.

Warner Bros. claims Fox has no rights to the movie, and they will not push the release date back. But if the WB decides to stick to their guns and not pony up the cheddar to Fox for at least distribution rights, fanboys can expect March to come and go without watching the Watchmen.

So now that the movie that spent all those years in “development hell” is completed, it’s possible it will wait around in “release purgatory” until the studios can figure out who is going to make the money off this thing.

At least we’ll all have time to re-read the book.