Paramount is still dealing with that prickly Top Gun: Maverick lawsuit

Last summer, when Tom Cruise was flying laps around the box office and shooting the hell out of [generic, unnamed foreign enemy] in Top Gun: Maverick, Paramount was hit with a lawsuit claiming that it had infringed on the copyright of Ehud Yonay—the late journalist who wrote the 1983 “Top Guns” article that inspired the original Tony Scott-directed Top Gun movie. Yonay was credited in the original film, but not in the sequel, and Yonay’s heirs have argued that the rights to the story had reverted back to them in the years since the first movie came out and so Paramount was required to make a new deal with them before releasing the sequel.

Paramount’s argument last year was that the movie had mostly been completed before the rights would’ve reverted to Yonay, so any issues with the rights to the story were irrelevant. Now, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, both sides are in court trying to convince a judge to make a summary judgement on the matter, which means a whole lot of arguing about who is right. Both sides have also expanded their arguments since last year, with Yonay’s heirs now pointing to specific sequences and story beats from Maverick that they say are pulled from the “Top Guns” article.

For example, stuff in the sequel like student pilots getting “shot down” in training, ace pilots getting invited back to the Top Gun program to be instructors, and someone getting in trouble at a Navy bar for not following its arcane rules are all supposedly pulled from the original article (according to Yonay’s heirs. However, Paramount argues that everything in Maverick that is also in the article can’t be subjected to a copyright claim because they’re “reported in the Article as factual.”

Similarly, Paramount says that the Navy bar scene, where Maverick has to buy everyone a round of drinks for having his cellphone out, is based on something that really happened to Maverick director Joseph Kosinski (who also says that he hasn’t read the “Top Guns” article). Paramount adds that any factual details about life in the Navy or things that could hypothetically happen to Navy pilots in this kind of situation came from working with the actual Navy.

The Yonays, meanwhile, have a pretty compelling counter, noting that Paramount was happy to consider the “Top Guns” article “an expressive copyrightable ‘story’” right up until 2020 when it lost the rights and it “flip-flopped and renounced its long-held legal position it benefited from for decades.” Basically, Paramount is saying “we don’t need it and we never needed it,” while the family of the guy who wrote the article that at least partially inspired the original movie is pointing out that that wasn’t the case until just now.