Showtime Networks and Lionsgate’s Entertainment One have beaten a lawsuit accusing them of ripping off 2015 survival thriller Eden in Yellowjackets.
Both follow a soccer team whose members start to exhibit cult-like behavior and contemplate cannibalism after crash landing in a remote location. U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson on Friday dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the plots, characters, themes and settings of the two works aren’t similar enough to constitute copyright infringement.
Eden, written by Nate Parker and distributed by Voltage Pictures, was released in 2015. Showtime sensation Yellowjackets premiered in 2021 to critical acclaim. Its second season opener became the studio’s most-streamed debut ever, drawing roughly 2 million viewers across all platforms. The third season as a whole was the most-watched so far for the series, with its finale drawing in three million watchers in its first seven days.
Alleged plot similarities between the movie and TV series was part of the court’s analysis, with Pregerson finding that present-day timeline in Yellowjackets “bears little resemblance” to Eden’s story.
While the makers of Eden argued that the movie heavily alludes to cannibalism, the court said that the plot instead focuses on the characters’ debate over whether to withhold food from injured survivors. Across the two weeks the film takes place, the main character’s faction is successfully able to gather food without ever considering or resorting to cannibalism, the order stated.
Other similarities, the court said, are common tropes found in several survival thrillers. It pointed to the death of a head coach and survival of his two children, attempts by survivors to escape isolation and the division of groups into rival factions.
“There can be no serious dispute that escape attempts by shipwrecked or stranded survivors are prevalent throughout fiction and history, from Odysseus, Robinson Crusoe, and Gilligan to Shackleton and the Uruguayan rugby team,” Pregerson wrote. “Instances of competition, tribalism, and factionalism in disaster scenarios or in response to resource scarcity are nearly as commonplace, from ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Survivor’ to much of the post-apocalyptic genre, such as the ‘Mad Max’ films or any of a number of zombie stories, to, most archetypically, ‘Lord of the Flies.’”
And since the two works share basic plot points, it’s natural for them to have identical tones, the court reasoned. It explained, “It is difficult to imagine how any serious drama involving a descent into ritualized cannibalism, and its aftereffects, could possibly exclude elements of solemnity and brooding contemplation.”
In his ruling, Pregerson rebuffed arguments that Eden and Yellowjackets have overlapping characters and settings. While the survivors in Eden are led by Slim — an adult, male, Black athlete who serves as the moral compass of the group — Jackie, the team captain in the TV series, is depicted as a “teenage, white, whiny, self-absorbed girl” who’s ultimately excluded by her peers.
The judge also stressed that Eden takes place on an uninhabitable tropical island, which he said bears no resemblance to the boreal Canadian wilderness in Yellowjackets. “Moreover, the ‘desolate area’ setting highlighted by Plaintiff is a common element of survival stories, including historical events such as the travails of the Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes or the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada,” Pregerson added.
Showtime didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Over the past few years, creators and holders of copyrights have been growing bolder in bringing idea theft lawsuits. There’s been a push by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to curb the early dismissal of copyright infringement claims. In 2022, the federal appeals court reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit over M. Night Shyamalan allegedly ripping off a 2013 independent movie for his Apple TV+ series Servant. This followed the revival of a copyright lawsuit brought by writers Arthur Lee Alfred and Ezequiel Martinez Jr. alleging that Disney lifted their ideas for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, as well as an identical decision bringing back to life a copyright case of The Shape of Water. The court found in those two cases that they were prematurely dismissed since reasonable minds could differ on whether the works are substantially similar.