MacGruber Sued By…MacGyver??
And the news just keeps on getting weirder, folks, as I discover there are stirrings of a lawsuit being poised on Relativity Media, the guys bankrolling MacGruber.
Before you start sputtering much the same way I did when I first heard about it–I know what I was thinking about “parody rights” just blowing this sucker CLEAN out of the water–hold on a moment.
It turns out that the MacGyver crew may have a case after all. Parody is a limited right, as it turns out. You can do a brief mockery–stuff like sketch comedy and Mad Magazine movie parodies are easily covered. Even larger films get some credit, stuff like Stan Helsing and Scary Movie, if the stuff parodied is brief or small or significantly altered, which is why the Freddy analog in Stan Helsing had a toothbrush as one of his finger claws.
But in a case like MacGruber, in which an entire movie is built on a parody, that’s a bit different. There’s not a lot of significant alteration. And saying that the movie is based on a protected sketch is pretty shaky legal-wise.
So anyone who was actually looking forward to a MacGruber movie should probably just brace for disappointment, like now.
“MacGruber” has anyone ask Richard Dean Anderson what he thought off this film??? he has been Queit so far, this tells me he does not aprove or he would have spoke before now, I beleave this film is why over the top from what I have seen, MacGyver give us hope without the use off guns and I from N/Ireland that lived though the real bad times here will never watch “if” MacGruber ever made it to the screen, I would be most disapointed as a fan if Richard Dean Anderson aproved this film