The heirs of one of the film’s inspirations Top Gun (1986) filed a lawsuit Monday against Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement, according to court documents.
Thirty-six years after Tom Cruise’s hit airplane movie, inspired by an article by Ehud Yonay titled Top Guns published in 1983, Paramount released the sequel at the end of May, Top Gun: Maverick.
Presented in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Tom Cruise received a Palme d’honneur, the Paramount / Skydance film took off as soon as it was released. It has just ranked in the top 10 of the ten best recipes for a second weekend in the United States and Canada.
In their lawsuit filed with a court in California, Shosh and Yuval Yonay, respectively the author’s widow and son who live in Israel, say they recovered the copyright to the story in 2020 and accuse Paramount of having “deliberately ignored this”.
“The Yonays contend and Paramount deny that the 2022 sequel, like the 1986 film, is derivative of the author’s story,” according to the complaint.
The Yonays seek an injunction to prevent Paramount from distributing the sequel to the film as well as damages of an unspecified amount.
These accusations are “baseless” and “we will defend ourselves vigorously,” Paramount said in a Monday statement quoted in multiple media outlets.
Following Top Gun was critically acclaimed. Tom Cruise still plays Navy test pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, now a captain, who trains to bomb the uranium enrichment plant of a country considered hostile.
The film, whose release was delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic, boasts a strong cast, with Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller and Jon Hamm, while the veteran of Top GunVal Kilmer, makes a brief appearance in the role of “Iceman”, a key character from the first installment.