Dave Franco and Alison Brie sued for ‘blatant rip-off’ of indie film – UK Times

Dave Franco and Alison Brie are being sued for copyright infringement over their new horror movie, Together.

Franco, 39, and Brie, 42, who are married in real life, play a couple who become fused together in the supernatural body horror that is set to be released in July.

However, StudioFest producers Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale claim in a lawsuit filed in California today that the film is a “blatant rip-off” of their 2023 romantic comedy Better Half.

In a statement to The Independent, a spokesperson for WME said: “This lawsuit is frivolous and without merit. The facts in this case are clear and we plan to vigorously defend ourselves.”

According to the lawsuit, a casting director working on behalf of StudioFest approached Franco and Brie’s agents at WME Entertainment in 2020 with the script for Better Half, hoping to cast them in the film. The couple passed on the opportunity.

Earlier this year, the producers learned that Franco and Brie were instead starring in a film they claim is “virtually identical.”

“Both works center around a couple who wake up to find their bodies physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency,” says the suit. “The similarities do not end there. Defendants lifted wholesale creative elements, including but not limited to, plot, themes, characters, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, and sequence of events.”

Several similarities between the two films are cited in the suit, including that: “In both works, Plato’s Symposium serves as a thematic vehicle to explore the idea that humans were once whole but were split apart, leaving them searching for their missing half.

“Indeed, Together copies Better Half’s explicit reference to Plato’s Symposium in a virtually verbatim way, with both works explaining that humans were originally created with two faces and eight limbs and were split in half by Zeus because the gods feared man’s power.”

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It also claims that: “Both works end in the same way, with the couple pulling out a vinyl record of the Spice Girls album—Spiceworld—in the scene where they accept their fate.” It states that both films reference the “same exact Spice Girls song ‘2 Become 1.’”

The Independent approached representatives for Franco and Brie for comment.

Together sold to film distributors Neon for a reported $17 million after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Better Half was written and directed by Patrick Henry Phelan. Together was written and directed by Michael Shanks, who is also named as a defendant in the suit along with Franco and Brie’s agency, WME.