“Top Gun: Maverick”: Paramount sued for copyright infringement

The heirs of one of the inspirations of the film Top Gun (1986) filed a complaint on Monday June 6 against the Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement, according to court documents. Thirty-six years after Tom Cruise’s hit airplane movie, inspired by a 1983 article by Ehud Yonay titled Top Guns, Paramount released the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, in late May. Presented in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Tom Cruise received a Palme d’honneur, the Paramount/Skydance film has just ranked in the Top 10 of the ten best receipts for a second weekend in the United States and Canada. In their lawsuit filed with a court in California, Shosh and Yuval Yonay, respectively the author’s widow and son who live in Israel, say they recovered the copyright of the story in 2020 and accuse Paramount of having “deliberately ignored this”. “The Yonays contend and Paramount deny that the 2022 sequel, like the 1986 film, is derivative of the author’s story,” according to the complaint. The Yonays seek an injunction to prevent Paramount from distributing the sequel to the film as well as damages of an unspecified amount. These accusations are “baseless” and “we will vigorously defend ourselves,” Paramount said in a statement quoted in multiple media outlets. The sequel to Top Gun received critical acclaim. Tom Cruise still plays Navy test pilot Pete Maverick Mitchell, now a captain, who trains to bomb the uranium enrichment plant of a country considered hostile. The film, whose release was delayed two years by the Covid-19 pandemic, boasts a strong cast, with Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller and Jon Hamm, while Top Gun veteran Val Kilmer , made a brief appearance there as Iceman, a key character from the first installment.