MOVIE NEWS – Alcon Entertainment, which owns Blade Runner 2049, is suing Elon Musk and Tesla for misappropriating its sci-fi film for promotional purposes…
The owners of the film rights to Blade Runner are taking Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. to court after they claim the electric car maker fed footage from the movie Blade Runner 2049 into an artificial intelligence-powered imager to create unauthorized promotional materials, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
The lawsuit, filed today in California, alleges copyright infringement and false sponsorship. It takes aim not only at Tesla but also at Warner Bros. for allegedly facilitating the partnership. The plaintiff production company, Alcon Entertainment, claims that it has an interest in preventing BR 2049 from being associated in any way with Musk, who they consider a toxic personality due to his known “extreme political and social views.”
“Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account. Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk.”
It seems that Tesla did not use the footage from Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi thriller as it is. Instead, it used AI-generated images that mirror scenes from Blade Runner 2049, including one with Ryan Gosling’s stunt double, which Alcon considers a malicious practice aimed at making the event more appealing to a global audience and appropriating the well-known franchise to promote the now famous “robotaxi”. No further details are available at this time.
The director of I, Robot also “complained”
So far, neither Warner Bros., Tesla, nor Elon Musk have spoken out. In recent days, although without a lawsuit, we also learned that the director of I, Robot has accused the entrepreneur of appropriating his plans for the Will Smith film. However, it is possible that his messages were more anecdotal in nature. Let’s not forget that Blade Runner is set to return in series format.
Source: THR
