Why Steven Spielberg was sued over ‘Small Soldiers’
Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has been involved in more projects than he could ever humanly take on, providing that there is indeed a limit to his talent. Away from Jurassic Park, Jaws and Schindler’s List, Spielberg was once involved in the 1998 action comedy movie Small Soldiers, directed by Joe Dante.
Spielberg had only been related to the film in the smallest of ways, serving as an early overseer of the project’s potential and did not serve as a producer. The film features early performances from Kirsten Dunst and Gregory Smith and further voice-over efforts by Frank Langella and Tommy Lee Jones.
It tells of two rival factions of toy soldiers that become sentient when they are installed with a military piece of processing equipment, and when one faction turns lethal, the family whose children own them are suddenly placed in danger, leading to warfare on a tiny scale.
Roger Ebert had not been impressed by the film and wrote in his two-star review, “What bothered me most about Small Soldiers is that it didn’t tell me where to stand–what attitude to adopt. In movies for adults, I like that quality. But here is a movie being sold to kids, with a lot of toy tie-ins and ads on the children’s TV channels. Below a certain age, they like to know what they can count on”.
However, a poor critical response was the least of the film’s worries by the time the new millennium rolled, as in 2000, the filmmaker Gregory Grant filed a lawsuit against Spielberg, DreamWorks and Universal, claiming that they had infringed on the copyright of his 1990 short film Ode to GI Joe. According to Grant, Spielberg had requested a 16mm version of the film for Amblin Entertainment just before they pushed ahead with what would become Small Soldiers.
Grant’s attorney, Ira Reiner, had stated at the time that “several scenes appear to be directly lifted from [Grant’s] film, and the scenes are far too similar to be explained away. We see this as a little guy against the big guy case. It is highly unlikely that a jury will conclude anything other than [that] there was copying here.”
DreamWorks insisted, though, that Small Soldiers had indeed been created independently. The lawsuit rolled on until finally, the jury assessed the film’s script and Grant’s claims and found that Small Soldiers was a work of originality. Though things were precarious, those little soldiers lived to fight another day.
Check out the trailer for Small Soldiers below.
