You might be thinking you heard this news already, and in a way, you have. Last fall, a French court ruled in John Carpenter‘s favor after he took EuropaCorp and screenwriters Stephen St. Leger and James Mather to court alleging that Luc Besson‘s 2012 film “Lockout” was a ripoff of “Escape From New York.” Besson, who is credited with co-writing the screenplay, had a story credit, and was also named in the suit, appealed the decision. And unfortunately for Besson, the verdict still stands.
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AFP reports that the appeals court has determined that “Lockout” had “massively borrowed key elements” from Carpenter’s film, and was ordered to pay him 450,000 euros. Damn. To get a taste of what the courts found egregiously similar, here’s an excerpt of the initial court ruling last year:
A number of elements present in both ‘[Escape From New York]’ and ‘Lock-Out’ could in fact be considered as stock elements in cinema. Other elements differed, such as the pace of the film and the special effects, but this could be because of the amount of time that had passed between the releases of the two films — 1981 and 2012 — and by the evolution in both techniques and mentalities in the intervening period. The court nevertheless noted many similarities between the two science-fiction films: both presented an athletic, rebellious and cynical hero sentenced to a period of isolated incarceration —despite his heroic past— who is given the offer of setting out to free the President of the United States or his daughter held hostage in exchange for his freedom; he manages, undetected, to get inside the place where the hostage is being held after a flight in a glider/space shuttle, and finds there a former associate who dies; he pulls off the mission in extremis, and at the end of the film keeps the secret documents recovered in the course of the mission. The court held that the combination of these elements, which gave the film ‘New York 1997’ its particular appearance and originality, had been reproduced in ‘Lock-Out’, apart from certain scenes and specific details that were only present in the first film. The difference in the location of the action and the more modern character featured in ‘Lock-Out’ was not enough to differentiate the two films.
The extra blow for Besson in all of this is that the original damages he had to pay were far less — 20,000 euros to Carpenter, 10,000 euros to the original screenwriters, and 50,000 euros to the rights owner of the movie. The appeals court substantially increased the amount to be paid, though it was less than what Carpenter wanted (approximately $2.4 million), so Besson sees a silver living in that.
“….the judges did recognise that there were many differences between the films — and that in their totality the movies were quite different. We think that is important, and the fact that the damages were a lot less than were demanded reflects that,” a representative for Besson and EuropaCorp said.
Sure, maybe, but that’s not what people are going to remember about this case. [Yahoo]