The Kurt Russell cult classic that was sued for plagiarism: “The evidence is so overwhelming”
Cult movies can’t be created, designed, or engineered; it’s a status that needs to be earned and awarded by audiences. However, Kurt Russell has evidently got a better nose for sniffing them out than most of his peers, and the actor has become synonymous with movies that only get more popular with time.
While every star would love nothing more than for all of their films to be revered, respected, and profitable out of the gate, Hollywood doesn’t work like that. Russell has been in his fair share of under-performers and box office flops, but plenty of them have gone on to attain cult status.
Just ask the man himself: Russell is fully aware of his reputation as the industry’s reigning king of the cult classic, pointing to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China, Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars, the beloved western Tombstone, and his onscreen union with Goldie Hawn in Overboard as his preferred examples.
That doesn’t even mention the likes of Breakdown, Bone Tomahawk, Death Proof, Soldier, or Sky High, all of which fit neatly into the cult category. That collection of enduring favourites has made Russell an icon, even if there have been a couple of instances where the originality of his work has been called into question.
He’s never personally been sued for ripping anyone off, but others have been accused of cribbing from his back catalogue without giving due credit. John Carpenter successfully took Luc Besson to the cleaners for the sci-fi actioner Lockout, even if the filmmaker declined to give video game creator Hideo Kojima the same treatment for the video game series Metal Gear Solid.
Roland Emmerich’s 1994 blockbuster Stargate almost convinced Russell to quit acting altogether, but he wisely decided to stick around. The movie was a huge success and came within a whisker of clearing $200 million at the global box office before going on to launch a long-running multimedia franchise that encompassed TV shows, video games, novels, comic books, and more.
One person who definitely wasn’t a fan of Stargate was high school teacher Omar Zuhdi, who claimed the storyline bore an awfully suspicious amount of similarities to a script he’d shopped around town in the mid-1980s. When a judge decreed that there was enough merit to the case to proceed in front of a jury, the aspiring screenwriter wasn’t surprised.
“We expected it,” he said, per The Oklahoman. “The evidence, to me, is so overwhelming that I couldn’t see a ruling any other way.” Zuhdi’s script, Egyptscape, was rejected by 20th Century Fox in 1984, with MGM eventually funding Stargate a decade later. He sought damages of $140 million, the entire net profit posted by Emmerich’s big-budget adventure.
Things didn’t quite get that far, and Zuhdi didn’t see a fraction of the money he demanded, but the matter was eventually settled out of court.
