Terminator: Genisys
Courtesy of MPC/Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Visual effects company Rearden has settled one of the few remaining lawsuits, this time with Paramount, over the unauthorized use of motion-capture technology by a major Hollywood studio.
According to court documents, the two sides filed a motion on Monday to dismiss allegations that Paramount infringed Rearden's MOVA Contour visual effects software on the 2015 film “Terminator Genisys.” The move marks the end of Rearden's legal offensive against the studios, which it launched in 2017 with a massive complaint asking the court to block the release of several movies from Disney, Fox and Paramount featuring characters created with stolen technology.
The agreement comes after Rearden reached an agreement last month to resolve a similar lawsuit over the use of MOVA in Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Deadpool, The Fantastic Four and Night at the Museum: Secrets of the Tomb. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
A factor that may have influenced the decision to settle was the fact that a jury in Oakland awarded Disney just $600,000 in damages for infringing Rearden's technology to animate the CG characters in Beauty and the Beast. This amount was only a fraction of the damages Disney could have lost in the case, which threatened its profits from Beauty and the Beast. Rearden claimed that the film's box office success was due to the VFX work done by MOVA, and sought more than $100 million in damages. The decision indicates that the jury did not attribute a significant portion of Beauty and the Beast's box office success to Rearden's technology. Of the $255 million profit Disney made from the film, the jury believes that about $345 million was due to the use of the software.
Five months after Beauty was released in theaters, Disney was sued by Rearden for improperly using the company's technology in three films, including Guardians of the Galaxy and multiple Avengers movies. At the heart of the dispute was whether DD3, a company that Disney and other studios worked with, owned the technology. A complex chain of ownership, including bankruptcies and fraudulent sales, led to confusion over ownership and licensing.
Rearden, a company started by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Pearlman, sued Paramount in 2017, alleging that MOVA was used to make Arnold Schwarzenegger look younger. The suit sought a cut of the film's profits.
As a precursor to Rearden's legal battle with Disney, in 2016 a federal judge froze Digital Domain's MOVA license with a preliminary injunction targeting DD3 affiliates Shenzhen Haitiancheng Technology and Virtual Global Holdings, a British Virgin Islands-based company that thought it owned MOVA and licensed it to DD3. U.S. District Judge John Tiger found that the companies had “fraudulently” transferred ownership of the technology between various Chinese companies. The order set the stage for Rearden to go after the various studios using the technology.
Paramount and Kelly Krauss, an attorney for the studio, did not respond to requests for comment.
