Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris
Amazon has finally settled its long-running lawsuit with filmmaker Woody Allen. For those not up to date on their hot Allen news (say hi to Jeff Goldblum for us, by the way), said lawsuit grew out of the company’s decision, back in 2018, to cut ties with the filmmaker after discovering—in, we feel moved to point out again, 2018—that he might not be the morally upstanding human being they thought they were working with, and that his reputation in Hollywood/on Earth might not be the pristine document of charitable acts that they had automatically assumed. Per Variety, the suit—which initially saw Allen seek $68 million in damages related to minimum payments he was promised for four films with the streaming and retail giant—was mutually settled on Friday night, with no word on what form the settlement itself actually took.
Amazon dropped its big-budget deal with Allen last year, after he essentially labeled the #MeToo movement a “witch hunt”—i.e., the thing you would pretty much expect Woody Allen, a man who has been fending off accusations of sexual assault for decades, to stay. Still, this appears to have just plain flummoxed Amazon, which shelved Allen’s latest, A Rainy Day In New York, and backed out of three other planned films with him. Amazon’s statements in the lawsuit claimed that Allen’s words made him a “pariah” in Hollywood, which, again, is the sort of thing that’s proven to be quite a bit less true than a lot of people might prefer.
Again, there’s no word on how much money Allen ended up making out of this whole kerfuffle, although “Quite a bit” feels like a pretty solid guess. Despite the breakup with Amazon, he’s also continued to find funding for future movies; his next film, Rifkin’s Festival, finished filming last month.
