Horror movie legal battles have gotten very interesting and very depressing in recent years, with the Friday the 13th mess representing the worst of the worst for hardcore fans like ourselves. But now the 2017 version of IT has been dragged into its own legal battle, with the previous adaptation’s producers arguing they’re entitled to some stake in the film’s success.
THR breaks the whole thing down, but the gist is that Frank Konigsberg and Larry Sanitsky, executive producers of the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, filed a lawsuit this week in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that they had a contractual right to be involved in any “sequel, series, remake, or spinoff” of the mini-series, which they claim the new movies are.
Of course, the Andy Muschietti-directed films are actually new adaptations of King’s novel rather than “remakes” of the 1990 adaptation…right? Well, I suppose it depends on who you ask. And if you ask Konigsberg and Sanitsky, the two new movies from Warner Bros. and New Line represent a failure to honor those aforementioned contractual obligations.
“That the 2017 feature film is indeed a ‘remake’ is indisputable,” they say.
THR reports, “The plaintiffs say they shepherded development of the 1990 miniseries, but that despite its success, a profit participation statement in 1995 showed the miniseries was in deficit with no profits to distribute. The two say they then waited 25 years for another profit statement when finally this past March, they got one showing they were entitled to $1 million in profits. The lawsuit questions whether that’s really everything, and Konigsberg and Sanitsky include claims of fraud over the accounting.”
Essentially, the duo is fighting for a stake in the profits made from 2017’s IT and this year’s IT: Chapter Two; they claim they’re entitled to “a minimum share of 10 percent of net profits.”
Whether Warner Bros is even responsible for honoring those previous obligations to Konigsberg and Sanitsky is up in the air, and it’s similarly up for debate whether or not the new movies can even be considered as part of the “sequel, series, remake or spinoff” clause of that decades-old contract. That’s all up to the courts to decide, and indeed they’ll soon have to.
