Connect with us

News

Guillermo Del Toro Hit with Lawsuit Concerning Alleged ‘Shape of Water’ Plagiarism

Published

on

With the Oscars fast approaching, most of the film industry is concerned over their nominations and wardrobe choices for the big night on March 4th. Meanwhile, Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water has been nominated for “Best Plagiarism.”

David Zindel – son of the 1969 play Let Me Hear You Whisper playwright’s Paul Zindel – seeks to take Del Toro and Fox to court on the grounds of “obviously” plagiarizing his father’s play.

via Vanity Fair

The Guardian, who broke the original story, described both movies’ plots for comparison as follows,

In both stories, a female cleaner works a night shift at a lab and falls for an aquatic creature that is the subject of mysterious science experiments. Both women develop a relationship by bringing food to the animal and dancing with a mop in front of the tank to the tune of a love song.

The two cleaner characters both learn to communicate with the creatures, and both labs are involved in secretive military operations. The protagonists both discover imminent plans to kill the creature, and both labs mention “vivisection”.

Both women also devise plans to rescue the animal and release it to the sea by sneaking it out in a laundry cart. In “Let Me Hear You Whisper”, named after a song lyric that the laboratory plays for the dolphin, the creature repeatedly says “hamper” to the protagonist, Helen, to encourage her to get a laundry cart.

Both women are friends with another janitor who helps them – Danielle in one version of Zindel’s work and Zelda in Del Toro’s film, played by Octavia Spencer, who was nominated for an acting Oscar alongside Hawkins.

Photo credited to YouTube/Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures.

When described in this manner, the two stories seem fairly similar, but as Fox Searchlight claims to Deadline after near a month of handling this case:

The way the play has been described, in the suit and along the way as these reports have appeared, it seems to be undoubtedly about a dolphin, and animal experimentation, about an animal being freed from a lab, and that is the end of it. The Shape of Water is so many things, so many colors. It’s not about an animal, it’s about an elemental river god. These ideas are not interchangeable or equivalent; this would be tantamount to saying that E.T. would be the same story if you substituted the alien for a hamster.

While at a surface level their plots are heavily similar, both movies seem to have crucial elements within their plots that make them drastically different from one another. This is especially prevalent in conjunction with audiences speculating that Del Toro intended The Shape of Water to be a sequel or successor to The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Shape of Water has received critical acclaim and is (currently) nominated for 13 Oscars, including: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Costume Design. Despite Del Toro’s suspicions that the plagiarism claim has come forth this close to the Oscars in an effort to capitalize on the film’s success, he wants to handle this dispute in a court of law in opposition to rumors and article headlines;

I really cannot stomach the timing of this accusation. It’s pretty transparent what is happening here. To me, it’s actually a relief to take something from the arena of opinion into the arena of fact and law.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

on

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

on

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

on

Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading