The humble, but legally sufficient, debut of Dan Dare.note
A cheaply and quickly produced work, not intended to be shown to the masses and disseminated only to the minimum extent required to fulfill some non-artistic obligation like claiming a trademark.
The term originated in The Golden Age of Comic Books, when there was a big rush to copyright as many characters and titles as possible, but the production time available was measured in days or hours, far too short to put out a real comic. The solution? Create a simple mock comic, often just a cover and some unrelated filler made up of garbage sheets, and submit it to the copyright office. The term itself comes from the fact that these comics often weren't actually distributed to newsstands, just going straight to the ashcan (period vernacular for trashcan) once their purpose had been served.
Starting in The Dark Age of Comic Books, an "ashcan" copy of a comic, often black and white and limited in distribution, would sometimes be distributed as a promotional item. These comics were called "ashcans" for marketing reasons (i.e. to imply rarity and value like the Golden Age versions) but really had little to do with Golden Age ashcans.
In the wider culture, "ashcan copy" has stuck around to describe any project rushed out to meet deadlines solely because of the strange intricacies of trademark and licensing law — especially in the US, where television or movie adaptation contracts often have a "use it or lose it" expiration date by which a license must be exercised to prevent reversion to the original rights holder. In extreme cases, it is a No Budget work that they know will not even have any financial recoup, but retaining the rights just to sell it to another studio may be more profitable.
While the Ashcan Copy originated in comics, many contemporary cases involve movie concepts optioned from other media, as such contracts usually include reversion clauses and film development is a notoriously lengthy and troubled process. A similar practice exists in television programming, where episodes of cancelled series are "burned off" in graveyard time slots.
If, by chance, these works ever actually do see distribution, expect them to become infamous. See also Franchise Zombie for other examples of shameless IP exploitation. Compare with Contractual Obligation Project; a situation where a work must be completed because it is mandated as opposed to being done to prevent an outcome.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Saban Brands dubbed Smile PreCure! and Doki Doki! PreCure as Glitter Force and Glitter Force Doki Doki because they were in the same package that gave the company the rights to Digimon Fusion.
- The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was fast-tracked on a low budget and pushed for a theatrical release with relatively little advertising in order for New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. to maintain the film rights to Tolkien's Legendarium. Sure enough, a new batch of Middle-earth-based live-action films was greenlit shortly thereafter, with Peter Jackson returning to direct them.
- After the marketing team for Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise decided to hold the "official' premiere at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood rather than in Japan to drum up more hype, they quickly commissioned a heavily edited English dub named Star Quest so that the film could be played to Hollywood journalists and insiders without subtitles (allegedly, the localization was done not by a professional translator, but by someone who had previously written for My Little Pony 'n Friends). It vanished without a trace after said premiere and was superseded by Manga Entertainment's dub, and wouldn't be seen again until a copy was uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2023.
Comic Books
- One of the best-known examples in comics is Flash Comics, which was actually the title of two different ashcans from different companies seeking claim to the title. DC Comics' Flash Comics combined cover art from Adventure Comics #41 with pages from All-American Comics #8; Fawcett's Flash Comics (also printed under the title Thrill Comics) featured the origin of Captain Thunder, who made his first regular appearance as Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics Number 2 (Whiz Comics #1 was itself an ashcan copy).
- DC Comics' Action Funnies ashcan contained pages from Detective Comics #10 and cover art that would later appear in color on Action Comics #3.
- Fawcett's 5-Cent Comics and Nickel Comics ashcans (black-and-white, no cover art) marked the respective debuts of Dan Dare and Scoop Smith, both of whom subsequently appeared in Whiz Comics. Nickel Comics became a regular series, but without Scoop Smith.
- Eerie #1 was a hastily assembled digest of horror comics with a print run of a few hundred copies, created by publisher James Warren to deny the title to rival publishers Myron Fass and Robert W. Farrell, whose company was named Eerie Publications.
- Following the "DC Implosion" (where DC Comics cancelled a whole bunch of titles all at once in 1978) they "published" Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, two 250-page editions of the cancelled comics just to secure copyright on the stories that had already been written & drawn. Only 35 copies were made, though black-and-white photocopies of the originals exist. The reprint was notable for being the first "appearance" of JLA member Vixen.
- After DC sued Fawcett regarding how close Captain Marvel was to their own Superman, Marvel noticed that the superhero's name was legally up for grabs and created their own Captain Marvel (given the company name, they couldn't be blamed). Then DC bought Fawcett and incorporated the now-rebranded Shazam into their universe. To avoid the trademark falling into disuse and becoming available to their biggest competitors, Marvel has had to publish at least one Captain Marvel title every year or two since, leading to a number of ongoing series, limited series and one-shots featuring a range of characters using the Captain Marvel alias (the original Mar-Vell, many of his sons and clones, and the current incarnation, Carol Danvers, who used to go by Ms. Marvel). DC eventually threw in the towel and officially renamed their character Shazam in the New 52 reboot onwards, leading to Carol holding onto the Captain Marvel name at a more consistent pace now that Marvel no longer was in such a hurry to hold the name back from DC.
- Supergirl: There was an ashcan Supergirl comic
published in 1944, apparently created to secure the title and logo's trademarks. The comic itself has nothing to do with any Supergirl (the first Supergirl character showed up in 1949, and the most iconic first appeared in 1959), being a reprint of Action Comics #80, with a The Boy Commandos cover pencilled by Jack Kirby.
- She-Hulk and Spider-Woman were born from an ashcan copy. After witnessing the success ABC had with Bionic Woman, a spinoff of The Six Million Dollar Man that starred a Distaff Counterpart to Steve Austin, Marvel took a look at their contract for the upcoming Incredible Hulk TV series and realized there was nothing stopping CBS from creating a female version of The Incredible Hulk that they would own the rights to. Although Stan Lee normally opposed such spinoff characters, he made an exception for She-Hulk in order to secure the rights to such a character for Marvel. Spider-Woman was likewise created to preempt Filmation's attempted to create a Spider-Woman character for Tarzan and the Super 7, forcing them to rename the character Web Woman.
Films — Animation
- The 1966 adaptation of The Hobbit. Producer Bill Snyder bought the film rights from J. R. R. Tolkien on the cheap, planning an animated feature with Gene Deitch's assistance. However, it was a low-priority project for his studio, and never entered serious production. Just before the rights were set to lapse, though, the popularity of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books skyrocketed. Realizing he could make a tidy return on his investment, Snyder set out to extend the rights long enough to negotiate a resale. However, his film had to be finished and released for that to happen. With the contract set to expire in one month, he convinced Deitch to hastily produce a 12-minute condensed version using still drawings, which was then screened in a single Manhattan theater on the day the contract would expire. The contract's conditions were thus fulfilled in the narrowest possible sense and it was duly extended, letting Snyder sell the rights for $100,000 (about $1,000,000 in 2024). The film finally resurfaced in 2012 when Snyder's son uploaded it on YouTube.
- The main reason for releasing Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was that Warner Bros.' license would have expired if they didn't release a new movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It went so poorly that the Roald Dahl estate revoked the license from Warner Bros. and gave it to Netflix. However, Warner was still able to greenlight a prequel entitled Wonka.
Films — Live-Action
- Marvel has had huge success with their own movie adaptations of their superhero characters, including the sprawling, interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, three of Marvel's most popular properties — Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men — were conspicuous by their absence in the MCU. This was because Marvel sold the movie rights to their best-known characters during a period of financial troubles in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, however, Marvel began experimenting with in-house movie production and was rewarded with several smash hits. Since then, Marvel has been very interested in permanently reclaiming properties that could be added to the MCU, and its licensees resorted to ashcanning productions in order to retain their movie rights. However, the movies in question were still made with a high budget regardless of their critical reception, disqualifying them from being proper ashcans, though this didn't stop the rare low-budget film from being made every once in a while:
- The 1994 The Fantastic Four movie is the truest to the spirit of the trope, being ashcan fodder extraordinaire. German studio Constantin Film acquired the rights in 1986 and was about to lose them forever, so they made the film cheap, hired famed B-Movie schlock-meister Roger Corman as producer, and it never got a wide release. It exists only in bootleg copies, some of which have made their way online. In 2004, Constantin teamed up with 20th Century Fox and finally filmed a movie that saw release the following year.
- The 1994 The Fantastic Four movie is the truest to the spirit of the trope, being ashcan fodder extraordinaire. German studio Constantin Film acquired the rights in 1986 and was about to lose them forever, so they made the film cheap, hired famed B-Movie schlock-meister Roger Corman as producer, and it never got a wide release. It exists only in bootleg copies, some of which have made their way online
- Part of the reason why Sony's Spider-Man Universe exists was so Sony can make additional money off of the Spider-Man license without relying exclusively on Marvel Studios making movies for them, in the process ensuring to investors that they are able to make installments that can succeed on their own merit. However, it's a rare example in which both sides are still willing to cooperate on a different level (IE: within the Marvel Cinematic Universe) instead of Sony simply trying to keep the IP away from Marvel, and the Spider-Man films in the MCU (Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home) were all well-received and highly profitable.
- Hellraiser: Revelations was quickly whipped together, with a mere 11 days of filming and about three weeks of post-production, specifically so The Weinstein Company could hold onto the rights to the Hellraiser franchise long enough to get a planned remake off the ground. The result is widely regarded as the worst film in a franchise that has seen its fair share of bad sequels, to the point where Clive Barker (who wrote and directed the original film) publicly disowned it and Doug Bradley (who played Pinhead in every film prior) refused to take part. In the end, it was All for Nothing, as the Weinstein Company collapsed under the weight of Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault scandals before the remake could be put into production. In 2020, the rights reverted back to Barker, who was credited as a producer when the remake (by Spyglass Media Group) was finally released in 2022.
- Children of the Corn: Genesis was rushed together by the Weinstein Company to keep the rights to the franchise.
- Dudley Do-Right and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle were supposedly made in part because Universal wanted to get the films out of Development Hell quickly so they could keep the film rights for the Rocky and Bullwinkle franchise. Both movies bombed at the box office, leaving Universal no other option but to give up the rights.
- A film based on the Vampirella comics had been in Development Hell for decades under different companies. Roger Corman's company had acquired the rights from the previous property owners at some point, but ultimately only made the 1996 film because they only had six months left before the license expired, requiring them to rush something out. After an incredibly Troubled Production, the final result was a poorly-received film that the director Jim Wynorski later regretted ever making.
- My Name Is Modesty, a low-budget 2004 thriller featuring a young Modesty Blaise, was made so the production company could hold on to the film rights long enough to get things moving on a proper Modesty Blaise film.
- Before Fox released the 2015 version of Fantastic Four, Dragonball Evolution was seen as their biggest ashcan copy. The main reason for the film's quality was that Fox rushed it into production just because the rights were expiring. Although many fans of the source material who have seen the film can name off a list of inconsistencies with the source material, critics slammed it for being more akin to a trashy Cliché Storm teen drama on The CW than an action/adventure story. (Through releasing Evolution, Fox was also able to distribute internationally three of the Dragon Ball anime films.)
- The little-known fourth Porky's film, Pimpin' Pee Wee, was produced on a very hurried schedule in 2009, purely to derail a remake of the first film that Howard Stern was attempting to mount.
- Day of the Dead 2: Contagium apparently started out as an unrelated zombie script that got hastily turned into a (nominal) prequel to Day of the Dead (1985), just so the producers could hold onto the rights long enough to release the planned theatrical remake. 2018's Day of the Dead: Bloodline released just under ten years after the previous remake, and like Contagium has nothing in common with the 1985 original outside of dealing with a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Pet Sematary (2019) turned out to have been put into production because, under US copyright lawnote , Stephen King would soon be able to reclaim the film rights to his novel Pet Sematary, and what's more, he had been aggressive about reclaiming the rights to his other books once the time came. Paramount, therefore, wanted to wring something out of the rights while they still had them.
- The film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. After spending decades in Development Hell as various attempts to make either a movie or a miniseries out of Ayn Rand's novel (some of them with Rand's involvement) flopped, millionaire investor John Aglialoro bought an 18-year option on it and pitched it to various studios throughout the '90s and '00s. With his options set to expire, Aglialoro sunk much of his personal fortune into financing the first installment, expecting a bigger budget for the next films. It didn't work out how he'd hoped; the first film was a Box-Office Bomb and the second and third films getting reduced budgets and limited releases as a result (but grossed lower and lower with each installment despite the budget being halved, twice).
- Seems to be the case for Hellboy: The Crooked Man, which was quickly made on a relatively low budget (at about 20 million USD, it had less than half the budget of Hellboy (2019), and less than a third that of Hellboy (2004)) and given a very limited release in a few European countries, while going Direct-to-Video in the United States, solely so Millennium Films could keep the rights to the character.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied in Arrested Development, where a fictional version of the '90s Fantastic Four movie is stated to be one of several movies made by Imagine Entertainment (the studio that makes the show): Ron Howard is told by a drunk lawyer at the company Christmas party that Imagine's Fantastic Four license would expire unless a film was made within the next six days. They immediately cast the film with the bartenders from the party, then hired the same bartenders to work the film's wrap party five days later.
- Red Eagle Entertainment rushed out an adaptation of The Wheel of Time in the form of a 22-minute "pilot" called Winter Dragon, starring Billy Zane, which follows the prologue of Eye of the World, but with a twist ending. According to the director, filming began on January 20th and post-production was completed on February 4th. It aired less than a week later at 1:30 AM on FXX. The TV rights to the Wheel of Time series were set to revert from Red Eagle Entertainment (which has held them since the mid-2000s) to the Bandersnatch Group (owned by the Robert Jordan estate) on February 11th. Needless to say, Jordan's widow was not pleased. Lawsuits were threatened against Red Eagle, and when the dust finally settled, Harriet was able to get the rights back and turned to Amazon Prime, which produced an actual series based on the novels.
- Warner Bros. produced a TV pilot called Black Bart based on Blazing Saddles just to retain the sequel rights to that film. Mel Brooks explained that he opposed the studio's desire for sequels and included a clause in his contract that all sequel and spin-off rights would revert to him unless Warner Bros. made a movie or TV show based on the film within six months of theatrical release. Brooks knew the studio couldn't produce a second movie in that time frame, and that network television would never be able to get a TV show based on Blazing Saddles past the censors. However, Warner Bros. realized there was a loophole in the contract: to retain the rights, they only had to make a spin-off — there was no requirement to actually air it. So the studio secretly produced a pilot with CBS (a 24-minute synopsis of the movie with Louis Gossett Jr. as Bart and language the network would never allow on air) and aired it once, late at night, to qualify it as a TV production. Several years later, they asked Brooks to make a sequel, and when he refused on the grounds that they no longer held the rights, the execs brought Brooks onto the CBS lot and screened the pilot for him to prove their point — although the sequel project died on its own merits some time later. The Black Bart pilot only saw the light of day again as a bonus feature on the Blazing Saddles DVD.
- In 2010, Turner Classic Movies quietly aired a bizarre special where Leonard Maltin interviewed Warren Beatty in-character as Dick Tracy. This special was made solely so that Beatty could extend his rights to make a second Dick Tracy film. A second special would air in 2023, with Beatty again portraying Dick as well as himself, with Dick actively complaining to Beatty about the film and the modern film industry.
- Gene Roddenberry wrote a set of lyrics to the Star Trek: The Original Series Theme Tune that he never intended to actually use on the show just so he could get half the song's royalties.
Music
- The Beach Boys final studio album on Capitol, the aptly named 20/20 (ostensibly named that because this was their 20th album overall, counting live albums and Greatest Hits Albums, to fulfil their 20-album contract with Capitol), which was filled with covers, throwaway tracks, and recycled material from previous albums (mostly from the ill-fated SMiLE). The band was reportedly saving their best material from the era for their Reprise Records debut, Sunflower.
- Bob Dylan's The Copyright Extension Collection was an official 4-CDR release from 2012 by Sony Music Entertainment of many unreleased sessions and alternate takes from the early 60s. Much of this music had remained unreleased simply because it wasn't commercially viable, but the copyright laws in effect when it was made would open it to the public domain in the European Union unless the studio publicly exercised its copyright within 50 years. The studio didn't want to draw much attention to this calculated business decision, so they released the album as a limited edition of 100 copies in a handful of European markets with minimal promotion. The set became immensely popular and copies sell for high prices - the music has never been re-released. Ironically, its limited availability and official status have encouraged far more downloading than if it had passed into the public domain unnoticed. The compilation later received two "sequels" in The 50th Anniversary Collection 2013 and The 50th Anniversary Collection 2014, both of which were released only on vinyl (six discs and 100 copies produced for 2013 and nine discs and 1000 copies produced for 2014).
- Capitol Records responded to a similar copyright crisis by releasing several digital-only rarities compilations from The Beach Boys, including several rare fan-favorites that may never have seen the light of day otherwise.
- A compilation of Beatles outtakes and live recordings titled The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963 was also released for this purpose, which like the Beach Boys compilations was digital-only.
- The Human League's 1981 single "Boys and Girls", the debut release of their "Mk. II" incarnation (though simultaneously the last song in their Mk. I iteration's Dark Wave style), was desperately rushed through production to begin clearing their heavy debts to Virgin Records. As an indicator of this, neither Joanne Catherall nor Susan Ann Sulley (then new to the band's lineup) appear on the song despite appearing on the single's cover, thanks to them still being in school at the time.
- Due to a contract dispute, Heart's original label, Mushroom Records, released the album Magazine without Heart's involvement in 1977. The band obtained an injunction and were able to re-record and remix it after the court found that they owed Mushroom a second album in 1978.
- In 1979, The Alan Parsons Project were nearing the end of their first contract with Arista Records when they came up with The Sicilian Defence, a hastily recorded collection of sound scraps meant to fulfill the contract so the band could focus on negotiating a new one without worrying about splitting time and attention between negotiations and music-making. The name, taken from a series of opening moves in chess, is apt, given the album was conceived as a "chess move" against Arista by band manager and songwriter Eric Woolfson. While never intended for public consumption, The Sicilian Defence finally received an official release as part of The Complete Albums Collection in 2014.
- Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a double album consisting of Lou Reed playing droning/squealing guitar feedback in Gratuitous Panning for over 60, joyless minutes, is usually seen as an attempt to get around a restrictive contract at RCA that required Reed to release two more albums before he could get out of it. It is said that recording contracts ever since have contained a "Metal Machine Music Clause" which states the albums an artist releases under the contract must sound 'like themselves'.
Pinballs
- After 5 years, the sponsors of the Magic Girl pinball machine started to wonder what they'd get for their money, and even considered a lawsuit against the creator, given the last they'd seen of the machine was a barely playable prototype at an expo in 2015. To stave off the lawsuit, in 2017, they all received... manufactured copies of the same prototype, with all the same faults, and some additional bugs introduced by expensive parts being missing.
Theatre
- H.M.S. Pinafore was a huge hit for Gilbert and Sullivan in their native Britain, but when they attempted to mount a production in the United States, they found that audiences were already familiar with unauthorized productions that had been "pirated" from performances seen in England. Their next musical, somewhat inspired by the experience, was The Pirates of Penzance. This time they premiered the show in America, but they still needed a British premiere for copyright back home, and couldn't rehearse two casts at once. The solution? Just before the Broadway opening, they had a (no doubt bewildered) touring company of Pinafore throw together a "British premiere" of Pirates, with one day's rehearsal, at an obscure theatre in an English seaside town.
Video Games
- Japan once had a law prohibiting arcade cabinets from being distributed without games. Manufacturers obliged by providing very simple games good for little more than testing the monitors and controls. Sega's Dottori-Kun and Taito's Minivader (Space Invaders but with fewer gameplay features than the original 1978 version) are typical examples, featuring primitive black-and-white graphics and no sound. Konami's Mogura Desse is a slightly more sophisticated example; it has color and sound to go with its highly simplistic gameplay.
- Aliens: Colonial Marines was a complete afterthought for Gearbox Software, and they used the money from the license deal to develop the Borderlands series and Duke Nukem Forever instead. As they still had to release Colonial Marines before the rights expired in order to not violate their contract and risk lawsuits, they slapped the game together and released it as an Obvious Beta.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is suspected by many to be a case of this. In the midst of its development, series publisher Activision was acquired by Microsoft for roughly $69 billion. However, Activision had an existing contract with Sony for priority in marketing Call of Duty games that was set for a certain number of games released, rather than a set number of years as is the norm (though given Call of Duty is an annual franchise, they likely didn't see much of a difference). Before MWIII was announced, it was heavily rumored that 2023's entry would have just been an extra year of support for Modern Warfare II; between the rushed development of this game (most Call of Duty games since Sledgehammer Games entered the mix in 2011 have had three-year development cycles, but they were only given two years to work on MWIII) and how heavily the game links with its predecessor (most everything players could buy or unlock in Modern Warfare II, from weapons and their attachments to operators and vehicle skins, carries over to and is available in MWIII), many strongly suspect that the work put into a second year of support for MWII was hastily repurposed into a full game to exhaust the contract and return full marketing control to Microsoft as soon as possible. Sure enough, the very next game in the series, Black Ops 6, would have all its marketing handled by Microsoft, including featuring heavily in their summer showcase and being added to Xbox Game Pass on launch day.
- Crash Team Racing: Naughty Dog only had a three-game contract with Universal regarding the Crash Bandicoot IP, meaning that CTR was made with very little funding on Universal's end. Couple this with poor work conditions due to the contract being over and the deadline for the game's development being less than a year, and Naughty Dog created CTR as their last hurrah before they lost the rights to Crash Bandicoot (including them attempting to Torch the Franchise and Run by introducing the alien Nitros Oxide as the antagonist). Despite all of these setbacks, the final product turned out to be an incredibly polished game that was one of the PlayStation's best-sellers.
- When Dead by Daylight announced in 2021 that it would release non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on Hellraiser to tie in with a recent DLC pack featuring Pinhead, many fans of the game were outraged and saw it as a cash grab. Some immediately speculated that the release of the NFTs was largely due to the rights to the Hellraiser franchise being set to revert back to Clive Barker in December of that year; the rights holders created the NFTs as one final attempt to get some money out of the property.
- DreamWorks Super Star Kartz can be seen as a last-ditch effort on Activision's part to profit off their DreamWorks Animation licenses before they expired. The game itself is very low-budget and features a lot of reused assets from other DreamWorks titles, has a small roster and track selection with three characters and tracks being alternate variants of other characters/tracks in the game, the soundtrack consists entirely of public-domain stock music, and the engine and mechanics are reused from a cancelled Crash Team Racing reboot. It would notably be the final DreamWorks game published by Activision, as all following titles were handled by other publishers.
- Final Fantasy XV was rushed out to a November (originally September) 2016 release due to a Product Placement deal that was about to expire. As such, Version 1.0 was released in a very bare-bones state, with large, unfinished areas, a cut-down story that leaves several characters and areas unexplored, unpolished gameplay missing several quality-of-life features and a plethora of bugs and glitches. Fortunately, the team would be allowed to work further on the game to get it closer to their original vision, with periodic updates and DLC being released until director Hajime Tabata resigned from Square Enix in late 2018.
- Skull & Bones was stuck in Development Hell for eleven years before it was finally released in 2024, and the only reason it wasn't canceled outright, as one might expect a game with its Troubled Production to have been, was due to contractual obligations with the government of Singapore. Had the game been cancelled, Ubisoft would have had to refund the considerable tax breaks they'd received from Singapore to base the studio that made the game there.
- In 2007, Atari commissioned a simple Adobe Flash game, produced in just four days, to maintain their trademark on Star Control.
- Star Fox Adventures had its development rushed due to Microsoft's planned purchase of developer Rare necessitating that the game be completed for the sale was finalized, to prevent any potential legal issues regarding its sale thanks to Nintendo owning the Star Fox brand. The game would manage to release a mere day before the sale was completed, with several planned elements being reduced in scope or scrapped altogether in order to meet the deadline.
- The Street Hawk game made for the British home computer gaming market encountered this trope during its development. Ocean Software had sold a gaming magazine the rights to bundle the game with a particular issue, but development stalled and they were in danger of missing the deadline and having to give the mag their money back, so an entirely different game was hastily thrown together to meet the letter of the contract. The stand-in game ended up being poorly-received, and the proper Street Hawk game didn't fare much better with reviewers when it came out a year and a half later.
- The Spectrum version of SQIJ! was hastily slapped together to fulfill the creator's contract with his publisher, The Power House, even though he had no real interest in working for them. The game ended being up badly-received by reviewers, and, on top of negative press, it was later discovered that it had shipped with a Game-Breaking Bug caused by accidentally activating the Caps Lock key on start-up.
- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 has been called an Ashcan Copy, as it was released in a unfinished state with numerous game breaking bugs. Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk's long-term contract with Activision, signed in 2002, was set to expire at the end of 2015, so Activision allegedly rushed the game out the door in September of that year as one last cash-grab (and possibly to generate enough renewed interest to put a new deal on the table). Unsurprisingly, the game was poorly-received.
- Ultima Escape From Mt Drash. Only tangentially related to the legendary RPG franchise (Richard Garriott was a friend of its creator, Keith Zabalaoui, and gave permission for the name to be used in order to help him leverage a publishing deal with Sierra), it was developed in 1983 for the VIC-20 - a computer whose much more capable successor (the Commodore 64) was already out. This, plus it requiring the VIC's tape drive and 8KB RAM expansion addons to run, ensured Sierra had no faith in its success; they ran exactly one advertisement for it in Compute! magazine, reused artwork from the back of Ultima II's box for the cover, and printed only the bare-minimum number of copies needed to fulfill their contract. Sure enough, it sold very poorly and now ranks among the rarest commercially-released video games of all time, with around thirteen copies in various states of completeness known to still exist. In a coincidental parallel to another infamous release from that time period, at least one surviving copy was salvaged from an illegal garbage dump in Canada years later.
Web Original
- This trope is the first point on Cracked writer David Christopher Bell's list of "6 Brilliant Explanations for Why Modern Movies Are So Stupid", describing it as "a juggling act of rushed sequels". He mentions several movies made solely to retain franchise rights, including Fantastic Four, Dick Tracy, Bourne Legacy, and Hellraiser: Revelations.
Western Animation
- In 2022, a one-minute Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short was released onto Disney+ and on YouTube, presumably made just so Disney could keep the character's trademark active before his first appearances entered the public domain the following year.
