Pete “Maverick” Mitchell has defeated any number of powerful foes in his time as the Navy’s Top Gun—but has he ever overcome an enemy as powerful as a pissed-off cousin with a word processor? This question floating through our heads today courtesy of a new THR report stating that a legal battle over the script credits for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick has now been decided in Paramount’s favor.
For those unfamiliar with the cousin claims, the lawsuit was brought against the studio by Shaun Gray, a relative of one of Maverick‘s credited co-writers, Eric Warren Singer. Gray has been claiming for a year or so now that he deserves credit on, and possibly co-ownership of, the $1.5 billion movie, because he semi-covertly wrote several of its more memorable scenes, including its action-heavy opening. Gray says he was brought onboard the project by Singer (one of three writers credited on the final script), and sat in on meetings with director Joseph Kosinski where he contributed several meaningful ideas to the screenplay. And since all of this was allegedly done without notifying the studio that it was getting fed script pages under the Thanksgiving table, he never signed the usual contracts that writers usually do, i.e., the ones where they waive all ownership of a project in exchange for their work-for-hire paychecks.
Unfortunately for Gray, a U.S. District Court judge has now ruled that whether or not he wrote the scenes that ended up in the movie is largely immaterial: Since those same contracts he never signed also cover things like granting writers the rights to use the studio’s IP without getting hit with copyright infringement strikes, Judge Jed Rakoff has ruled that any scenes Gray wrote for Maverick were violating Paramount’s existing Top Gun copyright. (Yes, even though the studio then used those scenes for its new Top Gun movie. Isn’t copyright law fun?) In the same hearing where he gave the summary judgment, Rakoff also indulged the studio’s need… for vengeance, green-lighting a countersuit Paramount launched last year in which the studio claims that, by not coming forward with his claims until after the movie was a big hit, Gray essentially attempted to defraud Paramount by creating this exact situation, where it had unknowingly relied on his work without giving them a chance to put him under contract. Truly, a terrible day for cousin-kind.
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