LOS ANGELES | The heirs of one of the inspirations of the film Top Gun (1986) filed a complaint Monday against the Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement, according to court documents.
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Thirty-six years after Tom Cruise’s hit airplane movie, inspired by a 1983 article by Ehud Yonay titled Top Guns, Paramount released the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, in late May.
Presented in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Tom Cruise received a Palme d’honneur, the Paramount/Skydance film took off as soon as it was released. It just made the top 10 of the top 10 recipes for a second weekend in the United States and Canada.
In their lawsuit filed with a court in California, Shosh and Yuval Yonay, respectively the author’s widow and son who live in Israel, say they recovered the copyright to the story in 2020 and accuse Paramount of having “deliberately ignored this”.
“The Yonays contend and Paramount deny that the 2022 sequel, like the 1986 film, is derivative of the author’s story,” according to the complaint.
The Yonays are seeking an injunction to stop Paramount from distributing the sequel to the film as well as damages in an unspecified amount.
These accusations are “baseless” and “we will vigorously defend ourselves,” Paramount said in a Monday statement quoted in multiple media outlets.
The sequel to Top Gun received critical acclaim. Tom Cruise still plays Navy test pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, now a captain, who trains to bomb the uranium enrichment plant of a country considered hostile.
The film, whose release was delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic, boasts a solid cast, with Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller and Jon Hamm, while Top Gun veteran Val Kilmer , makes a brief appearance there in the role of “Iceman”, a key character from the first part.
