Luc Besson has been ordered to pay John Carpenter half a million dollars for plagiarizing his classic 1981 movie "Escape from New York", court documents revealed Friday. Besson had denied that his 2012 film "Lockout" copied the cult futuristic thriller in which New York's Manhattan island is a giant prison that has been overrun by its inmates.
An appeals court in Paris ruled that "Lockout" had "massively borrowed key elements" of the earlier movie, according to a judgement put online Friday by BFMTV. A spokesman for Besson told AFP they were "very surprised by the ruling but the judges have spoken and we will accept their judgment."
Plagiarism cases in the movie business are notoriously difficult to prove, particularly as so many action and sci-fi films share similar tropes. Critics have long pointed to the uncanny parallels between the two films. Carpenter had demanded 2.2 million euros in damages ($2.4 million). Last year the court found in his favour and ordered Besson, his Europacorp production company and his co-writers to pay a total of 85,000 euros to Carpenter, his co-writer Nick Castle and StudioCanal, which holds the rights to "Escape from New York".
Besson appealed, with his spokesman telling AFP that the judgment was a "block on artistic freedom". His lawyers argued that "one of France's great talents of all time" would never intentionally stoop to plagiarism, and that "Escape from New York" itself owed much to the classic western "Rio Bravo" and "Mad Max", which had been shot two years previously. But the appeal court disagreed, increasing the damages more than five-fold to 450,000 euros.
Its judges said there was a long line of similarities between the films. But a spokesman for Besson and Europacorp said that "the judges did recognise that there were many differences between the films -- and that in their totality the movies were quite different. We think that is important, and the fact that the damages were a lot less than were demanded reflects that".
