It all started in 2017, when two screenwriters, A. Lee Alfred II and Ezequiel Martínez Jr., They took Disney to court, accusing it of having appropriated the essence of a script they sent to the producer. Disney rejected the story, but, according to the writers, they appropriated a multitude of elements to make Pirates of the Caribbean and, above all, they copied one of them.
Apparently, the key to the lawsuit is the character of Jack Sparrow and how he was the first performance of a pirate with lots of humor and a good heart in the background.
Yes, how you hear it. The plaintiffs believe that pirates have never been portrayed in this way before.
Alfred and Martínez claim that Sparrow is an imitation of their concept of the pirate Davy Jones, the protagonist of a script titled Pirates of the Caribbean, which they allege was introduced to Disney by its production company Tova Laiter in 2000.
The couple was already working with Disney on another story, called Red hood. The all-powerful entertainment company went down in pirate history, but apparently the script wasn’t returned to them until two years later. The writers point out that the original film and the sequels blatantly copy themes, settings, plot, characters and dialogue from their story.
The case has been reopened in court
Disney appeared to have expired in May 2019, when District Court Judge Consuelo B. Marshall granted them a motion to dismiss. The justice considered that the similar elements in the stories were genre topics not subject to protection.
However, in July 2020, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that: “The script (by Alfred and Martinez) shares sufficient similarities with the film.”
That means the case is moving forward and Disney is battling it right now in court.
For now, justice has not ruled definitively. Currently, the trial stops for a phase in which prosecutors must prove that Jack Sparrow was really their creation, while Disney plagiarized it without compensating them or recognizing the credit they had.
In that case, the producer would face a millionaire compensation that it would no longer make a saga that has exceeded a billion dollars in collection so profitable.
We’ll see if the charge is upheld that, until Jack Sparrow’s arrival, no pirate had ever had a sense of humor on screen, or hid a good-natured essence behind all that eccentricity and eye shadow.
