Dave Franco and Alison Brie body-horror movie 'Together' accused of being a rip-off

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A production company hit actors Dave Franco and Alison Brie with a copyright lawsuit Tuesday, claiming that “Together,” an upcoming body horror movie starring the real-life couple, is an unauthorized knockoff of a screenplay that was pitched to the pair five years ago.

StudioFest LLC, a production company that owns the rights to the “Better Half” screenplay as well as a 2023 movie based on the script, said in a complaint filed Los Angeles federal court that “Together” is a blatant rip-off of “Better Half.”

“Both works center around a couple who wake up to find their bodies physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency. The similarities do not end there. Defendants lifted wholesale creative elements, including but not limited to, plot, themes, characters, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, and sequence of events,” StudioFest writes in its complaint.

StudioFest claims it sent the script and synopsis for “Better Half” to Franco and Brie’s agents at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment in 2020, in a bid to get the couple to play the leads in the movie. However, the company was told that Franco wasn’t interested.

According to StudioFest, the couple, who have been married since 2017, rejected its offer because they wanted to produce the movie themselves and have WME package the project with one of the agency’s own writers.

In January of this year, the producers of “Better Half,” Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale, attended the screening of “Together” at the Sundance Film Festival.

“As the audience laughed and cheered, Jacklin and Beale sat in stunned silence, their worst nightmare unfolding. Scene after scene confirmed that defendants did not simply take ‘stock ideas’ or ‘scenes a faire’ but stole virtually every unique aspect of ‘Better Half’s copyrightable expression,” StudioFest says.

“Together” sold for $17 million to NEON Rated LLC, a distribution company whose other movies have included 2020 Best Picture Oscar winner “Parasite.”

The movie, which Variety described as “a squishy, fleshy, scream-worthy body horror movie” and as “the rare film-festival horror film that could wind up playing in megaplexes,” is scheduled to be released in theaters on July 30.

StudioFest’s lawsuit claims that both “Better Half” and “Together” center around a couple who wake up to find their bodies physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency based on Plato’s “Symposium.”

“Indeed, ‘Together’ copies ‘Better Half’s explicit reference to Plato’s ‘Symposium’ in a virtually verbatim way, with both works explaining that humans were originally created with two faces and eight limbs and were split in half by Zeus because the gods feared man’s power,” the production company argues.

Among other purportedly ripped off resemblances, StudioFest claims, both works feature a strikingly similar bathroom sequence where the protagonists become attached at the genitals and attempt to hide their intimate encounter from another a minor character in the story waiting just outside.

“This is not a generic comedic trope — it is a highly specific, artistic choice that plays out in a nearly identical fashion with both works framing the scene using a visual shot of the minor character’s feet peeking out from just outside the door,” StudioFest says.

Representatives of William Morris Endeavor didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

StudioFest claims copyright infringement against the agency, the distributor, Franco, Brie and the director of “Together.” They seek unspecified damages, disgorgement of profits and an injunction.

The company is represented by Daniel Miller and Samantha Rifkin of Miller Barondess in Los Angeles.

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