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A lawyer for Tom Cruise poured scorn on a $1 billion lawsuit alleging that filmmakers stole a screenwriter's work to create a blockbuster "Mission: Impossible" film, calling the legal action "bizarre."
Timothy Patrick McLanahan claims the 2011 film "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" was based on a script he wrote in 1998 called "Head On," which he tried unsuccessfully to get made in Hollywood.
He pitched it initially to the William Morris Agency, but "I was told... that they could not use the script as a movie," McLanahan wrote in the lawsuit, filed in December and published this week by celebrity news website Radar Online.
He alleges agents there then passed the screenplay, without his permission, to Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which represents Cruise, leading to a project he claims became the 2011 "Mission: Impossible" movie.
When McLanahan watched the film, "I immediately realized that the scripts for this movie had been illegally written and produced from Head On's 1998 copywright," he wrote in the lawsuit, which names Cruise among 13 defendants.
But Cruise's lawyer Bert Fields dismissed the lawsuit.
"Tom Cruise has never stolen anything from anyone," he told AFP Wednesday. "This bizarre lawsuit against 13 people... will be quickly dismissed by the court."
In his legal filing, McLanahan specified why he is seeking $1 billion.
He noted that "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" made over $690 million at the box office, some $145 million in DVD and Blu-ray sales, and millions of dollars in film rentals.
"Because the Ghost Protocol film generated close to $1 billion, I am asking for this amount in damages," he wrote in the lawsuit, filed in California on Dec 17.
© (c) 2014 AFP
13 Comments
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Jeff Ogrisseg
An attorney cannot "dismiss" a lawsuit. They can ignore it, downplay it, brush it aside or likewise, but only a judge can "dismiss" it.
Thunderbird2
Good luck to him... I knew someone who had a comic book rough turned down and not long afterwards a remarkably similar comic book came out from the publishers he submitted it to.
I doubt McLanahan will win, but I suspect this is probably quite common in La-la Land.
Nobody's Fool
It sure would have been nice to read about how the stories are supposedly similar.
Aaron Loki Brummett
Settle out of court... for something more realistic...
Bear27840
It will all be settled out of court for a lawsuit of theft would ruin Curise's reputation.
Nenad Jovanović
This isnt the first time something like this happened, in 2005 , when music group "Cabin Crew" showed their remix of "Waiting for a Star to Fall" to one big studio , they were rejected , but later that same studio gave that remix to the " Sunset Strippers" , so, here are original remix http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWs4abqdwZ0 , vs Sunset Striper version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c1Y34vgrI8 , have fun watching it .
OssanAmerica
First poster is correct. "Dismiss" is a legal term in a Court of Law and it should not be used in manner that it is in this article. An Action can be "dismissed" by a Judge (Court).
borscht
Dismiss also means, for us non-lawyer folks, not important or ignore; it also means allowing students to leave a class. So, technically, the use of dismiss is correct, but in an article about a lawsuit it should have been changed to any of the words suggested by Jeff Ogrisseg.
Graham DeShazo
Can we sue Mr. Cruise for just making generally horrible movies?
Serrano
I'd like to see McLanahan's script and the Mission Impossible movie to judge if his claim has any merit.
Nenad - Thanks for those links, those two videos are way different from each other, Cabin Crew's is sexy, Sunset Stripper's is funny!
LFRAgain
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there was merit to this lawsuit. Something I never liked about the Mission Impossible series was how far it fell from the original M:I team-centered concept (practically everyone from the team died in the very first installment) towards an almost exclusively Cruise-centered vanity project. I mean, M:i 3? Come on...
toshiko
1998: He may have his book in his hand writing in ink in that era, or he wrote with /XP based text writer or WP in many diskettes because floppy and 3 1/4 inches had very small capacity like 1 k bytes, It was old desk top (I call up desk) computer era.
Serrano
Heck, if I got hit with a billion dollar lawsuit, I'd dismiss it too.
Anyway, this lawsuit is indeed a mission impossible.