AMC Dismisses Walking Dead Lawsuit
AMC have responded to the recent lawsuit levelled at the company by The Walking Dead by creator Robert Kirkman and several of the show’s producers including Gale Anne Hurd, Glen Mazzara and David Alpert.
This is the second lawsuit filed against the network after original showrunner Frank Darabont was fired in the middle of production on the second season of the hit show. He is demanding $280 million in an accounting lawsuit that has reached the summary judgement phase and now the other key creatives on the series are following in his footsteps with their own lawsuit in what could be the largest profits case in television history with potential damages reaching as high as $1 billion.
The future of the show and the indeed the network hangs on the outcome of this suit.
The claims of the complaint, filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, are breach of contract, tortious interference and unfair or fraudulent business acts under California business code. It includes: “Failure to honor its [AMC’s] contractual obligations to the creative people… the defendant AMC Entities exploited their vertically integrated corporate structure to combine both the production and the exhibition of TWD, which allowed AMC to keep the lion’s share of the series’ enormous profits for itself and not share it with the Plaintiffs, as required by their contracts.”
AMC dismissed the “baseless and predictably opportunistic lawsuit” while also seeking to continue to work with the key creative personal. They said: “These kinds of lawsuits are fairly common in entertainment and they all have one thing in common — they follow success. Virtually every studio that has had a successful show has been the target of litigation like this, and The Walking Dead has been the No. 1 show on television for five years in a row, so this is no surprise. We have enormous respect and appreciation for these plaintiffs, and we will continue to work with them as partners, even as we vigorously defend against this baseless and predictably opportunistic lawsuit.”
A clearer picture of just what this means for the future of the show will come when the hearing in the Darabont case takes place in New York City on August 24th.
The Walking Dead Season 8 is due to air in the US on October 22, 2017.
