Appeal court in Paris rules Nikita director ‘massively borrowed key elements’ of the 1981 film Escape from New York

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The French filmmaker Luc Besson has been ordered to pay Hollywood’s self-styled “master of horror”, John Carpenter, nearly €450,000 (£379,000) for plagiarising his classic 1981 movie Escape from New York, according to a report published online on Friday.

The director of The Fifth Element and Nikita had denied that his 2012 film Lockout copied the cult futuristic thriller in which New York’s Manhattan island is a giant prison overrun by its inmates.

Kurt Russell plays a government agent-turned-convict who goes in to rescue the US president after his plane crashes there.

Lockout – review Read more

An appeals court in Paris ruled that Lockout had “massively borrowed key elements” of the movie, according to an online report by BFMTV (French).

In Lockout, Guy Pearce plays a man wrongly convicted who is offered his freedom if he can free the US president’s daughter from a jail in outer space that its violent prisoners have taken over.

Critics have long pointed to the uncanny parallels between the two films.

Box Office magazine called Lockout, which Besson wrote with the Irish filmmakers Stephen St Leger and James Mathers, “a sleek, slick and shameless rip-off of Carpenter’s Escape from New York” and its sequel, “Escape from LA”.

The Mandatory website joked that it was a “stealth remake”.

In his review for the Guardian, Philip French wrote: “John Carpenter … might well regard it as a remake of his 1980 Escape from New York.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Escape from New York, Kurt Russell plays an agent who rescues the US president from Manhattan, which is a giant prison overrun by its inmates. Photograph: Allstar/MGM

Plagiarism cases are notoriously difficult to prove in the movie business, particularly given that so many action and sci-fi films share similar tropes.

Carpenter, who is best known for his horror films Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, had demanded $2.4m.

Last year the court found in his favour and ordered Besson, his Europacorp production company and his co-writers to pay a total of €85,000 to Carpenter, his co-writer Nick Castle and StudioCanal, which holds the rights to Escape from New York.



Besson appealed, with his spokesman saying the judgment was a block on artistic freedom.

His lawyers argued that “one of France’s great talents of all time” would never intentionally stoop to plagiarism, and that Escape from New York itself owed much to the classic western Rio Bravo and Mad Max, which had been shot two years previously.

The appeal court disagreed, however, and increased the damages more than five-fold.

Its judges said there many similarities between the films. The heroes of both “got into the prison by flying in a glider/space shuttle, had to confront inmates led by a chief with a strange right arm, found hugely important briefcases and meet a former sidekick who then dies,” they ruled.

“And at the end [of both films, the heroes] keep secret documents recovered during their mission,” the judgement added.

Besson’s lawyers were not returning calls on Friday.

Carpenter, 68, who made his name with the hugely influential Assault on Precinct 13, is touring the US with a live show of his film music.

Besson’s latest project, the $180m sci-fi adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, got a thunderous reception when several scenes were shown at the Comic-Con festival in San Diego last week.

The film will not be released until mid-2017.