As far as franchises where the people making the TV show have gone on to sue the people releasing the TV show, it’s hard to beat the relationship between AMC and its former flagship program, The Walking Dead. Take, for instance, news today, when Variety reported that Dave Erickson—who co-created spin-off series Fear The Walking Dead, which ran for eight seasons on AMC—had lodged a lawsuit against the network claiming that he got screwed out of millions of dollars in profit participation on the spin-off. Erickson has now become the seventh high-level Walking Dead producer to sue the network, as his lawsuit joins a currently pending federal one from his co-creator Robert Kirkman, series executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, and several others, focused on the original series—which, in turn, followed one from original showrunner Frank Darabont that AMC actually settled (to the tune of $200 million) back in 2021. There has been a lot of suing attached to this franchise, is our point.
Erickson’s argument will be familiar to anyone who’s looked into those other suits: He claims that he was promised 5 percent of the modified adjusted gross receipts from Fear, an amount that has apparently added up to a whopping zero dollars. Indeed, AMC claims that, by its accounting, the show was apparently $185 million in the red—with said accounting, and AMC’s ability to allegedly manipulate it by being both the show’s producer and its distributor, serving as the crux of Erickson’s unhappiness. Or, to put it in legal-ese: “When a vertically integrated conglomerate like AMC both produces a series and licenses it to its various affiliates, domestic and international, cable and streaming, concerns about improper self-dealing abound. Erickson brings this action to rectify AMC’s egregious misconduct and to obtain the tens of millions of dollars in profits he is rightfully owed.” (Among other things, Erickson is claiming that AMC’s calculations for what count as “modified adjusted gross receipts” didn’t line up with industry standards, and were “the worst possible definition for a hit show in the history of television.”)
The network, meanwhile, has already fired back with the same ire (and, indeed, some of the same language) it’s been using to fight back against Kirkman’s multiple suits—and, before that, Darabont’s, which it fought for roughly a decade before ultimately relenting. “The contracts here were negotiated by the most experienced and sophisticated legal talent in Hollywood,” AMC’s lawyer said in a statement. “And AMC has fully paid what is owed. This is simply another crass money grab.”
