PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the 2022 Tom Cruise blockbuster “Top \u200bGun: Maverick” did not infringe a magazine article that inspired the original 1986 “Top Gun” film.<\/p>\n
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, said “Maverick,” from \u2060Paramount Pictures, was not substantially similar to “Top Guns,” a 1983 article by Ehud Yonay about the U.S. Navy’s Top \u200cGun fighter pilot training school in San Diego.<\/p>\n
Yonay gave Paramount rights to his article \u2060that year for the original “Top Gun,” and was credited in the film.<\/p>\n
His widow \u200cShosh Yonay and son Yuval \u200dYonay, heirs to his copyright, terminated the license in 2020 and said \u2060they deserved some profits from “Maverick,” whose $1.5 billion worldwide \u2060gross is the 14th-highest ever, according to Box Office Mojo. “Maverick” is also Cruise’s highest-grossing film.<\/p>\n
Lawyers for the Yonays did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Paramount, part of Paramount Skydance, said it was pleased that the appeals court “recognized that plaintiffs’ claims were completely without merit.”<\/p>\n
The Yonays, both from Israel, said “Maverick” shared plot, character, dialogue and thematic elements with “Top Guns,” with both \u200dworks depicting “what it takes to be the best of the best in fighter aviation.”<\/p>\n
The three-judge appeals court panel said “Maverick” contained many significant plot elements not in “Top Guns,” including a romantic subplot and Cruise’s character, Navy Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, returning to train younger pilots.<\/p>\n
It also said the Yonays described both works at “such a high level of abstraction” that the alleged similarities were not protectable.<\/p>\n
“Their claim of substantial similarity \u200cfails because what is protected is not similar, and what is similar is not protected,” Circuit Judge Eric Miller \u200cwrote.<\/p>\n
The panel added that Paramount was not required to credit Ehud Yonay in “Maverick” because his 1983 agreement did not cover the film.<\/p>\n
Friday’s decision upheld an April 2024 dismissal by U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Paramount is also defending against a lawsuit in New York by \u2060screenwriter Shaun Gray, who \u200bsaid he wrote several scenes that appeared in “Maverick” \u2060and deserves some of its \u200cprofits. Jury selection is scheduled for March 9.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the 2022 Tom Cruise blockbuster “Top \u200bGun:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[28,1302,3811,88,2695,3812,134,9746,3729,206,3,3813,3814,99,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":{"0":"post-385032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-film","13":"tag-homes","14":"tag-jobs","15":"tag-law","16":"tag-local","17":"tag-movies","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}