'Together' Lawsuit and Controversy Explained

Cosmopolitan

3 days ago

This year at Sundance, Dave Franco and Alison Brie premiered Together, a surreal horror-rom-com about a couple so codependent they literally fuse into one body. Directed by Franco and Michael Shanks, the film was billed as Cronenberg by way of couples therapy. But in the run-up to the movie's theatrical release, a lawsuit was filed for copyright infringement, alleging the idea for the movie was stolen.
According to a lawsuit filed in California federal court this spring, a production company called StudioFest LLC alleges that Together is an idea stolen from Better Half, a 2023 microbudget indie the company created that has a similar premise. The filmmakers are suing Franco, Brie, Shanks, their agency WME, and the film's distributor for copyright infringement, claiming that the film 'stole virtually every unique aspect of Better Half's copyrightable expression.' Beyond the core concept of physically conjoined lovers, there's plot, themes, characters, sequence of events, setting, mood/place, and dialogue in common. One example is a Spiceworld LP that characters pull out in the final scenes of both movies. Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale, the producers of Better Half, allegedly pitched the script to Franco and Brie via their agents at WME in 2020.
According to the lawsuit, they passed. And a few years later, Together arrives at Sundance with a beat-for-beat blueprint: two codependents stuck together, unraveling in real time, shot in the same minimalist style, obsessed with the same themes, and making the same references to Plato's Symposium.
Franco and Brie have remained characteristically tight-lipped in the press, but they, along with Neon (the film's distributor), WME (their agency), and Shanks have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The motion states that the copyright infringement claim fails because there is no "substantial similarity of protected expression" between Better Half and Together. And the similarities are general enough that they are not protected by copyright (like, a broad premise or theme based on Greek Mythology, for example).
Shanks has also published a rebuttal in which he insists the film was conceived as early as 2019 and inspired by his own breakup. He even has Writers Guild registration receipts to back it up. According to Shanks, the lawsuit is a misguided attempt to claim ownership over a universal metaphor–romantic codependency taken to its most absurd, literal conclusion.
The movies are similar. More than that, there are power dynamics at play. Better Half comes from StudioFest, a small indie production company with limited resources. Dave Franco and Alison Brie are a Hollywood couple with a fanbase and an awards-friendly distributor behind them. Whether or not Together was inspired by Better Half, the optics aren't great: the scrappy upstarts say they brought a story to the gatekeepers, only to watch it reappear a few years later in glossier packaging.
Together is out in theaters now, and the jury is still out. We've yet to hear the legal conclusion, but the dilemma is a timely one–an ethical referendum in a creative space where indie ideas often serve as mood boards for bigger studio projects.