Paramount has prevailed in the lower courts in a copyright infringement case over Top Gun: Maverick.
In a decision handed down last Friday, April 5, a district judge dismissed the case, brought by the family of Ehud Yonay, a journalist whose 1983 story for California magazine, “Top Guns,” inspired the original 1986 film. At the time, Paramount secured the exclusive movie rights to the story and Yonay received a “based on” credit.
In 2018, six years after Yonay’s death, his family began trying to retrieve the copyright to the story. It reverted back to them in January 2020, and though Top Gun: Maverick went into production in May 2018, the original suit claimed Paramount still needed to secure a new license because production was not completed until May 2021.
But U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson ultimately ruled that there weren’t enough similarities between Yonay’s original article and the sequel to support the copyright claim. Specifically, Anderson found that the plotting and pacing of the two works were “largely dissimilar,” as were the dialogue, characters, and setting.
To the extent there was some overlap between Top Gun: Maverick and Yonay’s article, Anderson ruled those specific details were not protected by copyright law. For instance, he said the themes in both works (“the bonds that form in military service,” “the sheer love of flying”) were “unprotected stock themes.” And there couldn’t be any copyright claim over the characters, because the characters in Yonay’s original story are “real people and therefore not protected by copyright law.”
And, the judge ruled, the only phrase the two works shared, “Fight on,” is one that’s “not entitled to copyright protection.”
Anderson’s ruling reflected a major moment in the case when he excluded a chunk of testimony provided by the Yonays’ expert witness. The judge agreed with Paramount’s contention that the testimony was “unhelpful” because the witness filed to “filter out” the kind of factual similarities between the two works that are not protected by copyright law.
A Paramount Pictures spokesperson tells Rolling Stone, “We are pleased that the court recognized that plaintiffs’ claims were completely without merit.”
But the Yonays’ attorney, Marc Toberoff, a seasoned copyright lawyer, said the family plans to appeal the ruling. “Paramount’s actions speak much louder than its counsel’s words,” he said. “In 1983, soon after Ehud Yonay’s cinematic ‘Top Guns’ Story appeared in California Magazine, Paramount literally raced to lock up the Story’s copyright to the exclusion of other Studios. … And unsurprisingly Yonay received credit on the resulting derivative film, Top Gun, spawning a lucrative franchise for the studio. Yet once Yonay’s widow and son exercised the rights Congress gave them in the Copyright Act to reclaim the author’s captivating Story, Paramount hand-waived them away exclaiming ‘What copyright?’ It’s just not a good look.”
Top Gun: Maverick was a major hit when it finally hit theaters in 2022 (star Tom Cruise famously insisted the studio hold the film so it could get a proper theatrical release after the Covid-19 pandemic). Amidst the lawsuit brought by the Yonays, work on a potential third film has reportedly begun, with Maverick co-writer Ehren Kruger working on a script and director Joe Kosinski likely to return, too.
