Credit: inside the MagicThe Walt Disney Company has scored a new legal win, this time over accusations that it had used stolen VFX technology to make Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), two of their highest-grossing movies ever. But while a judge has dismissed the initial lawsuit, it seems that Disney is not out of the woods yet.
Last year, a jury ruled against Disney when Rearden LLC, a noted VFX company, claimed that the iconic media company had illegally used its proprietary technology MOVA Contour to make the live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017). The film (directed by Bill Condon) starred Emma Watson as Belle, Dan Stevens as the Beast, Luke Evans as Disney villain Gaston, Josh Gad as Le Fou, and Kevin Kline. Although the film has largely disappeared from the cultural conversation in the years since its release, it was one of Disney’s biggest box office hits in years, grossing $1.26 billion worldwide.
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Disney was ordered to pay Rearden LLC nearly $600,000 for violating the company’s MOVA Contour copyright while working with Digital Domain, which worked on projects like Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), TRON: Legacy (2010), and multiple Marvel Cinematic Universe films. But while a six-figure payout is a large amount to the average person, it is compartively small potatoes to a company like Disney.
So it’s even worse news for Rearden LLC that U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar has thrown out its latest lawsuit, which the motion described as “the latest in a longstanding controversy regarding ownership and use of the MOVA Contour Reality Capture program (“MOVA”), which is used to capture high-resolution 3D models of a performer’s face and facial movements, in order to create facial animations for use in the production of movies.”
Judge Tigar ruled last year that Rearden LLC could not sufficiently prove that Disney was using its MOVA Contour tech, saying that that evidence does “not sufficiently support a plausible inference that DD3 operated MOVA or copied MOVA source code into output files such that MOVA was ‘broadly used in the creation of Infinity War and Endgame.'”
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Somewhat unusually, however, the Judge is giving the VFX company a third shot at suing Disney, saying that he did not believe it would be “futile.” Instead, he ruled that “The Court will therefore grant Rearden one final chance to amend its copyright infringement claim, wherein Rearden “must be willing to make [its] averments without caveat and/or with additional detail explaining the basis of [its] beliefs.”
It’s not all that often that a company gets this many do-overs, particularly when it comes to potentially claiming a portion of the profits from the Avengers films, some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. We’ll have to wait and see if Rearden can pull it off this time.
The full Rearden v. Disney motion for dismissal decision can be read here:
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