Just over 24 hours ago, newly minted Paramount CEO David Ellison and his top flight team were talking up what a top priority a Top Gun 3 is for their regime. Well, the sequel may be getting ready for take-off, but there’s a new counterclaim spin this week on the legal dogfight with self-declared co-screenwriter Shaun Gray over the Oscar-nominated script for the $1.5 billion and counting earning blockbuster.
“With these Counterclaims, PPC sets the record straight about who is the true aggrieved party in its dispute with Shaun Gray,” Paramount Pictures Corporation proclaims in its defendant’s answer and counterclaims filing of August 13 in federal court in NYC. The counterclaims come two weeks after Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who is also overseeing the fraud and money laundering case against Carl Rinsch for apparently ripping off Netflix for $11 million and more, delivered a mix verdict that handed Paramount a win in getting most Gray’s April filed copyright infringement case tossed out except the copyright infringement part.
In that context, and with a Tom Cruise starring franchise at possible risk (one of Hollywood’s true trigger points) clearly this is no mere airshow for Paramount.
“In 2022, PPC released its hit film Top Gun: Maverick —the sequel to its 1986 blockbuster Top Gun—to widespread critical acclaim and box-office success,” the fraud claiming and widespread damages seeking counterclaim in the federal docket says. “With Maverick’s success, Plaintiff and Counterclaim-Defendant Shaun Gray saw an opportunity to shake down PPC, but in the process, he has effectively admitted to infringing PPC’s copyright in Top Gun and defrauding PPC as to his purported authorial role.”
Holding some legit credits of his own, Gray, the cousin and sometimes assistant to credited Maverick co-scribe Eric Warren Singer, alleged in his initial a copyright infringement suit from the spring that he was In the jump seat on the script for Maverick with his relative and director Joseph Kosinski.
Keeping to himself for several years, Gray says in his April filing that he “wrote key scenes for the screenplay that became the Film’s central edge-of-your-seat dramatic action sequences that made it a smash hit.” Adding to the fog of war, so to speakl, Maverick military advisor Captain JJ “Yank” Cummings has spoken publicly about Gray’s contribution in pressure-cooker hotel writing sessions for the flick.
Still, Paramount, then still ruled by Shari Redstone, who was waiting for approvals on her $8 billion sale to Ellison’s Skydance, called the claims especially crapola and tried to get them dismissed.
Now, Paramount and their O’Melveny & Myers lawyers have taken a slightly novel and entrapping approach to handling Gray — if you are telling the truth, you are in whirlwind of trouble.
The August 13 filing postulates: “If, as Gray contends, he did not prepare the ‘Gray Scenes’ subject to Singer’s contract with PPC, or otherwise license the ‘Gray Scenes’ for PPC’s use in Maverick (which might entail a reciprocal implied license to Gray), then Gray lacked authorization to use PPC’s copyrighted material from Top Gun or the Maverick Materials when he allegedly wrote the ‘Gray Scenes’ and accordingly infringed PPC’s exclusive right to prepare derivative works of Top Gun and the Maverick Materials.”
With a sideshow of communication with the WGA over the Maverick script also a part of this case, Gray’s own lawyer Marc Toberoff did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on this latest turn of events.
As they say in Maverick, “it’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”
