Carpenter Sues Besson

It looks like someone took a sore hit recently.

Court reports have emerged showing that John Carpenter successfully sued Luc Besson’s Europacorp for copyright infringement over the similarities between Carpenter’s 1981 sci-fi thriller film Escape from New York, and the 2012 release Lockout, directed by Stephen Saint Leger and James Mather, and scripted by Besson and the two directors.

According to French law-specialist publishers Légipresse, the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris handed down its judgment on 7 May 2015, after making a “detailed comparison of the plot and development of the films”, and decided that Lockout had “reproduced” key elements of Escape from New York – known as New York 1997 in France.

An excerpt from the Légipresse report describes the court’s story analysis in detail:

The court … 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.