In 2009, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks company paid the estate for film rights to King’s words, along with his life rights, which allow a person or company to make content based on an individual’s story. DreamWorks has yet to produce or direct Spielberg’s planned King biopic, but the rights have caused complications for numerous filmmakers. (Neither Spielberg’s literary agent nor King’s estate returned Broadly’s request for comment.)
I’ll guess it’s that they don’t see a profitable way to use the content at the moment.
I prefer to think that over anything more nefarious, but that could be what’s going on, too. I’m assuming the rights will revert back to the estate after some amount of time, that’s what usually happens.
This article is from 2017 but if those rights are still tied up with Spielberg since 2009, that’d be a hell of a stretch for anyone to exclusively own a passage of historical value like “I Have a Dream” which is only 63 years old.