On January 17, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. (“Twentieth Century”) argued that a copyright infringement claim relating to the hit novel and film, Gone Girl, should be thrown out. The lawsuit was filed in December 2017 in Illinois federal court by Nevada-based screenwriter, Leslie Weller. Weller sued Gone Girl author, Gillian Flynn, and Twentieth Century, among others, claiming that the $370 million-grossing film is a rip-off of her copyright-protected screenplay, Out of the Blue (“OTB”). Weller asserts that Flynn may have had access to, or “at a minimum, had a reasonable opportunity to” copy her script or an unauthorized derivative of it. Amongst the relief sought, Weller demands all copies of Gone Girl impounded or destroyed and all profits from the novel or movie. According to Weller, she wrote OTB in 2005, revised it between 2005 and 2008, and later registered a copyright on “OTB3” in 2007, which refers to the third revision of “Out of Blue.”

The novel Gone Girl was first published in 2012 and sold more than 15 million print copies. The story was later transformed into a film which was released by Twentieth Century in 2014 and starred acclaimed actors, Ben Affleck, Neil Patrick Harris and Rosamund Pike. According to defendant’s motion to dismiss, Weller’s claim fails because she cannot plausibly contend that Gone Girl infringes her alleged copyright since the works are not substantially similar and because she has not alleged facts to support a finding that defendant had an opportunity to access her screenplay. Instead, Twentieth Century argues that Weller’s claim “hypothesizes that it found its way to Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn through a conjectured path of people and organizations in which her script would have changed hands at least five times.” Defendant alleges that Weller’s work was a “formulaic, soap-opera style story about multiple lovers” in “stark contrast” to Gone Girl’s “psychological, Hitchcockian crime story.” The film studio further asserted that the only similarities between the two works are so general that they cannot conceivably be protected by law, explaining that the Copyright Act does not protect general ideas, but only the particular expression of an idea. Further, Twentieth Century argues that Flynn’s novel was inspired by the real-life story of Scott Peterson who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife in 2004, and that the generic idea of a potentially violent husband and a pregnant wife is not protectable by law. But Weller claims that both Gone Girl and OTB contain striking similarities in their premise and plot, structure, scene content, and character biographies, among other things, entitling her to damages.