What are the limits of parody? The creator of MacGyver wants to find out – Latino Review is reporting that he’s looking to sue Universal over their upcoming MacGruber movie, based on the long-running SNL skit.
Creator Lee Zlotoff is apparently working on a MacGyver movie at New Line, and he’s poised to drop the suithammer on Universal/Rogue, but not in an attempt to stop the film from being released. In actuality he wants to get money from the movie – to become a profit partner.
Could this happen? I don’t know enough about the law to say, but I do find one of the theses in the Latino Review article – that parodies can only be short form and protected by law – to be silly in the extreme. I suspect that Zltoff’s suit will come to nothing, and that this is something that Universal/Rogue considered in advance. You just can’t have two Watchmen situations – where the studio legal team utterly drops the ball – in as many years. I refuse to believe it.
11 comments
I dread the thought that MacGruber might destroy the viability of a MacGuyver movie. This keeps me up at night.
Cool. I'm sure the creators of Dragnet will sue the Zuckers for Naked Gun. This is retarded.
I couldn't stand Will Forte for a while. Then I saw Beerfest, and that made me a fan of his. But his increasingly preening and grating presence on SNL and this stupid MacGruber phenomenon are turning me back toward not liking this chap very much.
You're all looking at this wrong. If this suit is successful we may see the Wayans brothers sued completely out of existence. Will Forte would be a hero to us all.
That depends on whether this MacGruber movie is, essentially, a parody (allowed) or satire (not allowed) and how straight they play the character versus actually parodying MacGyver as a character, the latter of which is allowed when the parody is directly levelled. This Fair Use law, after the Outkast Supreme Court case from the early nineties is a very facts-based process and, I'm guessing, the producer of MacGyver is banking on Macgruber's people not wanting to go through a protracted trial and trying to settle early.
mr. dean anderson co-starred in a few of McGrubers sketches.. and i was lead to believe he may be in the movie.. a McGyver movie is 15 years too late anyway so waiting to ride the tide of a parody is just sad..
I like Pepsuber better.
If there was any merit to this, Mel Brooks would have been sued for Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Oh, that reminds me; has Harlan Elllison sued Avatar yet?
One might have said "You can't have two Dukes of Hazzard situations" while Watchmen was ramping up…..
And Mutt….. who exactly do you think owns the copyright on Robin Hood…. a public domain character??
And others holding out other parodies as examples (Naked Gun, Scary Movie) – it's not the same. Those are aggregate parodies, sampling from dozens of sources, not sticking to a single one all the way.
The only thing I'm less interested in than a movie based on a 20-year-old TV show is a movie based on an SNL parody of a 20-year-old TV show. I was grateful for the ten year gap since the last awful SNL skit movie, but I guess Lorne Michaels just can't leave well enough alone.
Will that 30% difference rule of law would most likely disqualify this if it went to court but the trend in Hollywood is to settle these little things before they even go before a judge.
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