An animator is suing Disney and director James Cameron over alleged copyright infringement regarding Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).
Avatar: The Way of Water Lawsuit
As reported by Reuters, Eric Ryder states he worked with Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment to develop a movie based on his science fiction story KRZ in the late 1990s and claims Cameron copied elements of the story for the Avatar series.
This isn’t Ryder’s first lawsuit to this effect. He made similar claims in 2011 regarding the first Avatar film. A California state court dismissed the case because Cameron conceived of Avatar before Ryder submitted his story to Lightstorm.
Ryder is suing again for copyright infringement, unfair competition, breach of contract, and breach of confidence. He is asking for $500 million in damages and a court order blocking the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash. The third Avatar film will be released on U.S. theaters on Friday, December 19.
“This action is not an attempt to relitigate prior claims. It challenges new acts of copying that occur for the first time in Avatar 2,” the new lawsuit states.
Ryder’s attorney Daniel Saunders said in a statement, “The defendants’ alleged misappropriation and downright theft of Mr. Ryder’s protected creative work to create the third highest-grossing movie of all time is blatant and egregious, and it cries out for compensation.”
The lawsuit says, “Avatar 2 does not merely echo Ryder’s ideas at a high level of abstraction. It reproduces Ryder’s express creative work at the level of character architecture, plot sequencing, dramatic gimmicks, thematic construction, and dramatic resolution—expressive elements that are newly copied, plainly protectable, and entirely absent from Cameron’s asserted preexisting materials.”
The lawsuit points to Avatar: The Way of Water‘s introduction “as a central plot device an animal-based substance that when harvested extends human life—the very same unique and highly specific narrative mechanism that Ryder conceived and confidentially disclosed years earlier in Ryder’s KRZ works. This device did not appear in Cameron’s prior work or any preexisting materials and has no independent origin in Defendants’ documented development history. Its appearance for the first time only after Defendants had full access to Ryder’s proprietary work exemplifies the deliberate and unauthorized appropriation alleged in this action.”
Ryder’s KRZ story involves “anthropomorphic beings, a vast oceanic setting, and a sinister, Earth-based corporation engaging in environmentally harmful mining operations on the moon of a gas giant planet called Europa.”
Cameron was recently declared a billionaire with a net worth of $1.1 billion.
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