In the lawsuit, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the producers of Better Half allege that after Patrick Phelan wrote the script in 2019, the film’s casting director reached out to the WME agent representing Franco and Brie in 2020. The entire script was attached, the lawsuit says, and there was a $20,000 offer for them to take the lead roles. Obviously, Franco and Brie did not make the project, which continued production and quietly premiered in 2023.
But when Together debuted this past winter, the producers felt that the two films had too many similarities for it to be pure coincidence. (There will be discussion of plot elements of Together in the rest of this paragraph, so consider this a spoiler warning.) Per the suit, both movies center on a couple that becomes “physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency.” Both movies reference Plato’s Symposium as a plot device, both characters try solutions from “medical intervention to chainsaws,” both films have a scene where the main characters become attached at the genitals, and both films “end in the same way, with the couple pulling out a vinyl record of the Spice Girls album—Spiceworld—in the scene where they accept their fate,” according to the suit. The suit goes on to run through similar themes and character motivations that the two films allegedly share.
In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for WME characterized the suit as “frivolous and without merit.” The lawsuit concludes with a demand for a jury trial.
