Posted in: Movies, News | Tagged: frank miller, frank miller lawsuit, geof darrow, hard boiled, louis leterrier, sin city, sin city tv show, Stephen L'Heureux, zack snyder
Frank Miller in $25 Million Lawsuit Over Sin City, Hard Boiled RIghts
Frank Miller is involved in a $25 million defamation lawsuit right now, after producer Stephen L'Heureux filed on July 27th. The suit alleges that Miller and co-defendant Silenn Thomas have purposefully put the kibosh on a Sin City TV series and a feature adaptation of Miller's Hard Boiled at studios like Skydance and MGM. L'Heureux is seeking "compensatory damages, including lost revenue, loss of future revenue, damage to reputation, loss of goodwill, and emotional distress in an amount to be proven at trial but estimated to be in excess of $25,000,000". He also claims Frank Miller and Thomas have routinely made derogatory comments about his ownership of the rights to those properties to Hollywood execs and talent such as directors Louis Leterrier and Zack Snyder, not to mention Hard Boiled artist Geof Darrow.
"Despite these written agreements and repeated admissions and acknowledgments of L'Heureux's Sin City Rights and Hard Boiled Rights, and having been fully compensated for granting those rights to L'Heureux, Defendants, individually, collectively, and through their representatives, have engaged in a systematic campaign to defame L'Heureux, to damage his reputation, and to deliberately and wrongfully interfere with his contractual agreements and his prospective economic gain from the production of the Sin City and/or Hard Boiled projects which he intended to produce pursuant to the rights he obtained from Miller," the jury trial-seeking paperwork states (read it here).
"The claims asserted in Mr. L'Heureux's lawsuit are baseless, and we will be aggressively defending this lawsuit," Frank Miller's attorney Allen B. Grodsky of Grodsky, Olecki & Puritsky LLP told Deadline, who reported on this story.
Both of these projects have seen starts and stalls the last few years at multiple studios these last couple years, including at The Weinstein Company, Legendary, and Skydance, especially Hard Boiled. Look for more on this as it develops.