The lawsuit alleges that under the contracts of Robert Kirkman and Co., they should have received significant profits from the unprecedented success of the series. Their agreements entitled them to profit participation, but their profits were to come out of the AMC Studios profits. According to the suit, AMC deliberately kept the majority of the Walking Dead profits at AMC Network, where the AMC parent company could keep a disproportionate amount of the profit without sharing the agreed-upon percentage with the producers. Vertical integration has allowed AMC to do extraordinarily well with The Walking Dead; it seems that these four producers believe that they haven't received what they were due out of the show's success.