Original Road House screenwriter accuses Amazon of using AI to replace actors during strike

Screenwriter R. Lance Hill says Amazon was so desperate to finish the movie before losing the rights that it resorted to "extreme measures"

By Sam Barsanti | February 27, 2024 | 10:53pm

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Original Road House screenwriter accuses Amazon of using AI to replace actors during strike

Road House Screenshot: YouTube

At a certain point, a bunch of guys getting mad over the new Road House seems more like a feature than a bug, right? What is Road House if not a bunch of guys who are mad? First we had Doug Liman, who directed the remake of the Patrick Swayze classic for Amazon MGM, accusing the studio of tricking him into making a streaming movie when he thought he was making a theatrical movie. Then buffed-up Jake Gyllenhaal (who is starring in the remake) said that, as much as he likes Liman’s “tenacity,” Amazon was “always clear that it was streaming.”

Now, original Road House screenwriter R. Lance Hill (who used the pen name David Lee Henry) has ripped out another metaphorical throat with a lawsuit against Amazon over the Road House rights.

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As reported by The L.A. Times, Hill has sued MGM and parent company Amazon for allegedly ignoring his claim to the copyright for the original Road House. According to his suit, he filed paperwork with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2021 to have the rights revert back to him when original distributor United Artists’ claim expired in November of 2023, but Amazon took over those rights when it bought MGM and allegedly took “extreme measures” to try and finish the movie before the copyright expired in November.

And there’s a bombshell accusation in those “extreme measures,” with Hill claiming that the studio was so desperate to finish the movie as fast as possible that it resorted to “considerable additional cost” and “the use of AI” during the SAG-AFTRA strike in order to “replicate the voices” of actors. If true, that would be potentially terribly gross and craven, to say nothing of the possibility—as raised by this lawsuit—that it may have violated SAG-AFTRA’s contract with the AMPTP (which Amazon is a member of).

And, even then, the suit claims that the movie wasn’t finished until January, which would be months after Hill says the copyright should’ve returned to him. Hill is looking to stop the release of the movie, which is supposed to happen at the end of March.