It’s a tale as old as Hollywood: A writer drafts a screenplay and submits it to various competitions. They get some buzz, maybe even placing in a few, though their script ultimately doesn’t land anywhere. Then, they see a movie that feels similar to what they wrote. And after looking at the film’s IMDB page, they realize that they’re a couple levels removed from one of the title’s producers or writers, who they suspect may have read their screenplay once upon a time and ripped it off. They file a lawsuit.
Most copyright infringement lawsuits don’t go anywhere, but a writer suing over popcorn thriller G20 is looking to flip the narrative. In a complaint filed on Wednesday in California federal court, Clarice Eboni Boykin-Patterson alleges the producers behind the Viola Davis action flick copied her screenplay.
With G20, Davis joined the pantheon of action heroes tasked with saving the world from calamity. She’s the president of the United States with an extensive military background and weapons training but wait, she must also balance her very serious work life with a family. When viewers meet Davis’ character, she’s bickering with her 17-year-old daughter after the teen snuck out to a party at a Georgetown bar.
Boykin-Patterson, an entertainment reporter for The Daily Beast, challenges both works featuring “intense violence” with “warm, relatable familial drama,” among other things.
Like G20, Boykin-Patterson’s screenplay follows a Black woman in politics that must save an auditorium of people, including her family, from terrorists, led by a man with a personal vendetta, who’ve taken over the international conference (warning: spoilers ahead). She ultimately evades capture but her husband — whose main role is to support the political ambitions of his wife in both works — is kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip. In the movie and screenplay, titled “Election Night,” the protagonist’s friend appears to die but are eventually shown to have survived.
The lawsuit adds both works “feature the same themes; who gets to legislate and be in power in the future, does an inclusionary style of leadership edge out those who traditionally held power, and who inherits power and gets to wield it.” It also says they share the same genre: Tense thrillers that feature a race against the block with an “underlying tension and dread that result from the precariousness of the central characters, i.e. their gender and race and their overcompensation for these traits.”
While these broad similarities alone may not be covered by copyright law, the lawsuit alleges that, when aggregated together, they can constitute infringement. There’s some truth to the argument: Courts have found that a writer stringing together several elements that aren’t typically protected by copyright — like a ragtag group of misfits banding together to pull off a high-stakes con — can serve as the foundation to an idea theft claim. Still, there’s an uphill battle to climb.
In April, Showtime Networks and Lionsgate’s Entertainment One defeated a copyright lawsuit over Yellowjackets. The court found in that case that several of the alleged similarities are common tropes found in survival thrillers, pointing to the death of a head coach and survival of his two children, attempts by survivors to escape isolation and the division of groups into rival factions. If two works share basic plot points, it’s natural for them to have identical tones, the court reasoned.
“There can be no serious dispute that escape attempts by shipwrecked or stranded survivors are prevalent throughout fiction and history, from Odysseus, Robinson Crusoe, and Gilligan to Shackleton and the Uruguayan rugby team,” the judge wrote in an order dismissing the lawsuit.
A major factor in the case will be whether the producers and writers behind the movie have read Boykin-Patterson’s screenplay. In 2021, “Election Night” was submitted to the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship contest, where it was a quarterfinalist, and the Launch Pad Feature Competition, where it got to the second round, while being shopped around to various production companies.
The lawsuit stresses that Logan Miller and Noah Miller, the writers of G20, are managed by Daniel Sherman, an executive producer on the movie who’s been a judge in the Launch Pad competition, the same event Boykin-Patterson submitted her screenplay.
The decision comes amid a shift in the vetting of copyright lawsuits that’s increasingly encouraged creators to sue. In recent years, federal appeals courts have been cautioning lower courts against early dismissal and from imposing their views on whether two works overlap enough to warrant allowing lawsuits to proceed. One of those rulings — at least the third since 2020 overturning a defense-friendly decision in a copyright case — reversed a federal judge’s decision to toss Francesca Gregorini’s lawsuit against M. Night Shyamalan and Apple over Servant on the premise that dismissal was premature because “reasonable minds could differ” on whether her and the acclaimed horror director’s works are substantially similar.
That’s contributed to an uptick in copyright lawsuits actually getting to trial. Earlier this year, juries considered claims of infringement against Disney over Moana and Shyamalan over Servant. Both ended in defense verdicts.
The findings in those trials reaffirmed the high bar in convincing a jury that any alleged similarities between two works constitute copyright infringement. Copyright law doesn’t protect general ideas — like incidents, characters and settings considered standard in the treatment of particular topics (think a priest in a movie about possession) — only the particular expression of those ideas.
The last case in which a plaintiff may have come out on top involves the Shape of Water. After a federal appeals court in 2020 revived the lawsuit from the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, which alleged that the makers of the Oscar-winning film ripped off Let Me Hear You Whisper, a settlement was reached.
MRC, which distributed the movie, and JuVee Productions, Davis’ production banner, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
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