American film and television production and distribution company, Paramount Pictures seem to be in a bit of legal troubles over the rights to their latest installment in the Top Gun movie franchise, Top Gun: Maverick.
The family of the Israeli writer whose article inspired the 1986 Tom Cruise movie Top Gun is suing film studio Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement over its sequel.
They claim the studio did not have the rights to Ehud Yonay’s 1983 story “Top Guns” when it released the sequel Top Gun: Maverick last month.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday at the Los Angeles federal court by Shosh and Yuval Yonay.
Ehud’s widow and son alleges that Paramount failed to reacquire the rights to Ehud’s magazine article after it was terminated under the US Copyright Act.
They are seeking unspecified damages from the film studio, including profits from Top Gun: Maverick.
According to the lawsuit, Paramount’s Top Gun franchise would not have existed without Ehud’s “literary efforts and evocative prose and narrative”.
The lawsuit said that in 2018, the Yonays informed Paramount that its rights to Ehud’s article would be terminated two years later and that the studio lost the copyright for the piece in January 2020.
According to a report gathered by BBC, lawyer Marc Toberoff, who is representing the Yonays, said,
“Much as Paramount wants to pretend otherwise, they made a sequel to Top Gun after they lost their copyright,”
In a statement Paramount said: “These claims are without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Top Gun: Maverick had the fourth biggest opening weekend of any film in the Covid-era, behind the best-selling Spider-Man: No Way Home, second-place Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and then The Batman.
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