Frank Darabont is suing AMC over profit sharing for The Walking Dead , the smash hit series he created for the network, reveals The Hollywood Reporter . The suit, filed today in New York State Supreme Court, alleges breach of contract on the part of AMC to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in unpaid fees. The complaint offers an in-depth look at Darabont’s side of the dispute, which has been brewing since at least 2011.

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Fans of the series –- now the highest rated scripted drama on television –- have known of the battle between Darabont and AMC since AMC replaced Darabont as producer and showrunner for unspecified reasons in 2011. It has long been theorized that Darabont was let go due to a dispute over the show’s budget . According to the law suit, however, Darabont believes his firing was a direct result of a scheme to avoid paying him his contractual percentage of the show’s profits.The suit describes the events that led up to The Walking Dead getting the green light, including Darabont’s stalled talks with NBC and HBO before it ultimately landed at AMC. According to a deal memorandum between Darabont and AMC, AMC was to have the series produced by an unaffiliated studio, for example Lionsgate or Warner Bros. Television. AMC would distribute the show via its cable TV channel. In such situations, the distributor pays the producer a negotiated fee, which is how the producer makes its money. Darabont’s deal gave him up to 12.5% of that unaffiliated producer’s profits minus some industry-standard deductions.According to the complaint, AMC did not ultimately use an independent producer. Rather, after seeing Darabont’s script for the first season, AMC decided to produce the show in-house through one of its subsidiaries. Darabont and his co-plaintiff, Creative Artist’s Agency (CAA), speculate that AMC may have done this to avoid the situation they were in with Mad Men, a successful show that was produced by Lionsgate and therefore sent much of its hefty profits outside the company. AMC supposedly promised that Darabont’s fees would nevertheless remain at the level he could have reasonably expected had the production duties been handled by an unaffiliatged entity. This is where problems crop up.The plaintiffs claim AMC placed a perpetual, artificially low cap on the imputed fees it would pay its production arm for episodes of The Walking Dead. It says AMC paid over a million dollars less per episode of The Walking Dead than it paid to Lionsgate for Mad Men, despite the fact that The Walking Dead had four times Mad Men’s viewership. This cap would virtually guarantee that the series' balance sheet would always show a deficit, no matter how successful it was and no matter how long it ran. That would result in Darabont getting nothing. Per THR , this practice of self dealing has been central to numerous other “vertical integration” cases for shows such as Home Improvement, The X-Files, Will & Grace, and Smallville, which all aired on networks that had the same owners as the studios behind the series.The complaint also describes Darabont’s firing shortly before Season 2 aired and less than 48 hours after he appeared at Comic-Con to promote the show in 2011. It says that Darabont asked for but was never given any explanation for his termination and replacement by Glen Mazzara, whom he had hired to be his second-in-command. He alleges that he was dismissed so AMC would not have to fulfill its obligation to pay him fees for Season 2 or negotiate with him for Season 3.That’s a lot of information to process and the actual complaint goes into even greater detail. It also includes copies of the deal memos and agreements between the parties. Suffice to say, it will be interesting to see how AMC responds.Darbont's lead lawyer Dale Kinsella told THR, “AMC’s conduct toward Frank to date has been nothing short of atrocious. Unfortunately, the fans of The Walking Dead have suffered as well by being deprived of his creative talent."

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