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2012 TV News Archives

April 12, 2012: New Claim in "Smallville" Lawsuit Alleges WB Paid Itself for Superman Rights

Smallville HollywoodReporter.com has posted a report on a new development in the "Smallville" Lawsuit that has been running since March 2010 when the show's creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough and series co-producer Tollin/Robbins Prods. sued Time Warner (which includes Warner Bros. Television) over a disputed license fee deal.

    According to the court filing, the plaintiffs discovered during the discovery process that WBTV reduced Tollin/Robbins' profit participation by the "3rd party participation" of DC Comics, which owns the Superman rights. WBTV gave five percent of the gross receipts of Smallville, which lasted ten seasons on television, to DC for the rights to the Superman character.

    The plaintiffs say that DC isn't a "third party" but rather a wholly-owned subsidiary of Warners and that the studio had no contractual right to do this without authorization. The alleged act of self-dealing is calculated as having cost the series co-producer at least $13.4 million.

    Warners objected to the new complaint by saying that the defendants had known about this arrangement for nine years.

The new claim, which uses complete correspondence between the parties from almost ten years ago as evidence, states that Warners was "deliberately confusing" knowledge of a disagreement over this issue. A judge has now allowed the plaintiffs to movie forward with this new claim, with the trial set down for October 9, 2012.

Read the full report at HollywoodReporter.com.


2012 Television News

Listed below are all the Television News items archived for 2012 organized into various categories:

“Young Justice” Animated Series News:

DC Nation News: “Smallville” News: Other Superman Related Television News:

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