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Embarrassing Things Movie Studios Have Been Sued For

October 8th, 2017 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

While you are sitting on your couch and enjoy incredible real money online casino games available at All Slots, there’s something strange going on in the world. Namely, Stephen King’s “It” – or rather its latest on-screen incarnation – may end up being banned in Russia. And for a reason most would think is pretty embarrassing: its title character, played by Swedish actor Bill Istvan Günther Skarsgård (yes, that’s his full name) looks an awful lot like McDonalds’ famous clown, Ronald McDonald – and, apparently, the red balloons are also associated with this brand.

What makes this piece of news even funnier is that the people trying to keep King’s clown out of the country are none other than McDonalds’ biggest rivals in the country, Burger King. Apparently, seeing a killer supernatural clown on the silver screen, especially with a red balloon that spews blood everywhere, it an incentive to buy a Big Mac. And the King is ready to sue. While sometimes the lawsuits filed against movie studios are legitimate – think Norwegian lamp manufacturer Luxo’s suit against Pixar and its parent company Disney for using its signature lamp as a mascot for the studio – sometimes movie studios are sued for some of the most incredible and hilarious reasons.

Drive (2011)

While we all know movie trailers are often misleading – think the trailer of “The Orville”, that presented a show as a Star Trek parody, which it isn’t – people usually don’t sue the distributor for false advertising when the movie itself doesn’t live up to the hype. But in the case of the 2011 movie Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, things seem to have gotten out of hand. Apparently, a woman called Sarah Deming from Michigan was led to believe that the movie was yet another take on the “Fast and Furious” style, not the experimental – and admittedly hyper-violent – flick that received an R rating from the MPAA for strong brutal bloody violence, language and some nudity.

The suit was, of course, rejected in 2012.

Christopher Nolan’s “Batman”

While filming the undoubtedly impressive “The Dark Knight”, Christopher Nolan (along with Warner) was slapped with a lawsuit from an unexpected source. Apparently, there is a town in Turkey called “Batman” – the capital of the Batman province, named in the 1950s after the river Batman that traverses south-east Turkey and flows into the river Tigris.

It seems that the creators of Batman, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, have created a major issue by naming their hero after a bat and a man, that happened to also be a name of a city. So, the mayor of Batman threatened with a lawsuit against the director and the studio, claiming that they have used the name of his town without permission. Besides, he blamed the movies for a number of unsolved murder cases in the town, along with the high suicide rate of women.

Disney’s Frozen

Who would think that a Disney animated movie that involves magic – and a dancing snowman – is based on her life story? Well, an author named Isabella Tanikumi seems to have thought so – she sued Disney for $250 million for using events from her life story to create the insanely successful animated feature. She based her claims on her autobiography, “Yearnings of the Heart”, which seems to coincide in at least 18 points with Disney’s Frozen.

Of course, this lawsuit was also dismissed quite quickly by the judge.

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.