We all know that AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ is a HUGE success. And of course with success comes the desire for people to get what they believe they deserve.
The executive producers of TWD have filed suit against AMC. Frank Darabont, the show’s creator, filed a lawsuit back in 2013 following his termination halfway through the second season. Darabont claims that AMC denied him profits promised from the series by the network.
Now, the show might really be in trouble. Comic book creator and series co-creator Robert Kirkman along with executive producers Gale Anne Hurd, David Alpert, and Glen Mazzara have filed suit against AMC making similar claims as Darabont. The group are challenging the amount AMC pays its in-house studio, AMC Studios, THR reports.
‘The Walking Dead’ is not the only series that could be affected. Both ‘Fear the Walking Dead’, and ‘Talking Dead’ are also included in the suit.
This case arises from a major entertainment conglomerate’s failure to honor its contractual obligations to the creative people – the ‘talent,’ in industry jargon – behind the wildly successful, and hugely profitable, long-running television series The Walking Dead. The defendant AMC Entities exploited their vertically-integrated corporate structure to combine both the production and the exhibition of TWD, which allowed AMC to keep the lion’s share of the series’ enormous profits for itself and not share it with the Plaintiffs, as required by their contracts.”
While Kirkman haven’t reached the stage of proceedings, the damages could reach up to $1 billion. It would be the highest amount in a profits case in entertainment history. An amount like that could not only affect the show, but the network as a whole.
There can be no question that, if AMC Studio[s] and AMC Network were not part of the same conglomerate, the story would be very different. Those substantial license fees for Mad Men and Breaking Bad continued in seasons five and beyond, even though their ratings were a fraction of TWD’s. And while the AMC Network only obtained a limited number of playdates for those series as part of the comparatively-higher license fees it paid for them (both on television and its affiliated websites), the AMC Entities unilaterally took for themselves the right to run an unlimited number of runs of TWD in perpetuity on all AMC platforms.”
We hope that the court case won’t affect ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Fear the Walking Dead’, and ‘Talking Dead’. Honestly, we can’t help but wonderful if this is the beginning of the end for the series. Especially since Kirkman’s company Skybound just signed a major deal with Amazon.