Top Gun: Maverick suit can move forward against Paramount

LOS ANGELES – Paramount Pictures failed to persuade a judge to throw out a

copyright lawsuit

that claims the distributor released its blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick (2022) without securing a licence from the estate of the writer whose story inspired the original film about four decades ago.

United States District Judge Percy Anderson in Los Angeles allowed the lawsuit to move forward in a ruling on Thursday, rejecting Paramount’s claim that the plaintiff has not shown the article and the film are “substantially similar”.

“The court finds that there are enough alleged similarities between the article and the sequel for reasonable minds to differ on the issue of substantial similarity,” the judge wrote.

Top Gun is a jewel in Paramount’s portfolio of iconic intellectual property.

Top Gun: Maverick was its biggest box-office opening

since the release of Iron Man 2 in 2010 and has grossed US$1.5 billion (S$2 billion) worldwide since its opening on May 27, according to Box Office Mojo.

The lawsuit comes from Shosh Yonay and Yuval Yonay, the widow and son of Israeli writer Ehud Yonay, whose 1983 story was the basis of the original 1986 film Top Gun.

Ehud Yonay, who died aged 71 in 2012, published Top Guns in April 1983 in an issue of California magazine and registered it in the US Copyright Office later that year.

Soon after it was published, Paramount secured exclusive motion picture rights to the story, according to a complaint filed by his heirs in Los Angeles federal court. 

The Yonays claim that after sending Paramount a statutory notice of termination under the Copyright Act in 2018, they became the sole owners of the US copyright for the story in 2020.

They said they invoked a provision of the law that allows artists who transfer copyrights to reclaim those rights 35 years later. Bloomberg