After nearly a year of litigation, MGM and longtime James Bond producer Danjaq have voluntarily dismissed their copyright infringement lawsuit against Universal over its alleged ripoff of the James Bond movies. According to MGM’s original complaint, filed shortly after the studio retained Attack The Block director Joe Cornish to helm the movie, Section 6 revolves around “a daring, tuxedo-clad British secret agent, employed by ‘His Majesty’s Secret Service,’ with a ‘license to kill’ and a 00 secret agent number on a mission to save England from the diabolical plot of a megalomaniacal villain. Most moviegoers would assume from that description alone that this lawsuit concerns the next James Bond motion picture. It does not.”
Universal took a couple of failed stabs at getting the case dismissed before now, claiming that nothing in Section 6 infringed on the Bond movies specifically and that MGM was just trying to gain a monopoly on the British spy genre by threatening potential competitors with needless lawsuits. Whether those arguments eventually prevailed on Judge James Otero is unknown, but an attorney for Universal told Deadline reporter Dominic Patten that “The Parties have resolved the matter to their satisfaction,” which could mean absolutely anything. Universal may have caved to pressure and changed the Section 6 script, MGM may have just realized it had a losing case, or a Universal executive might have threatened to melt the MGM building with a satellite-mounted laser gun while gently stroking a white Turkish Angora cat. Who knows?
