The cousin of a Top Gun: Maverick writer has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures over script credits.
Shaun Gray claims that he penned key scenes for the 2022 film after screenwriter Eric Warren Singer and director Joseph Kosinski enlisted his help to craft the story behind the sequel.
He is seeking a share of profits from the film as a co-writer or, alternatively, unspecified damages for copyright infringement, according to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal court (via The Hollywood Reporter).
Gray claims Singer, after being hired by Paramount Pictures to pen the screenplay for the movie as a work-made-for-hire, approached him in 2017 to co-write it at Kosinski’s request.
Over the next five months, he alleges that he actively participated in story meetings and “wrote key scenes” for vital action sequences, the lawsuit stated, including an early scene in which Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, pushes a high-tech prototype fighter jet past its limits and another sequence in which he repeatedly outmanoeuvres pilots during a training exercise, culminating in a dogfight with a trainee. The lawsuit is said to include time-stamped files and emails that document his writing of the scenes.
Gray argues that he is a co-author of the screenplay since he never reached a work-made-for-hire deal, which governs a production company’s employment relationship with a writer and gives it the copyright to a script, with Paramount, unlike other writers on the film, including Singer, Eric Kruger, Christopher McQuarrie, Peter Craig and Justin Marks.
He also claims he never entered into any written contract regarding his work on the movie.
The lawsuit seeks for Gray to receive a “screenplay by” credit moving forward, for Paramount to include him in future marketing efforts and works related to the movie, and a cut of profit. If the court declines to issue such an order, he seeks a claim for copyright infringement and unspecified damages.
Paramount Pictures said in a statement via The Hollywood Reporter, that the lawsuit “is completely without merit” and that they “are confident that a court will reject this claim.”
Elsewhere, Cruise recently paid tribute to his late Top Gun co-star Val Kilmer, who died earlier this month, aged 65.
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