Eden Film Production LLC v. Lockjaw LLC

District court dismisses claim for copyright infringement against writers, producers and distributors of television show Yellowjackets, holding no substantial similarity between protectable elements of Yellowjackets and plaintiff’s 2013 film Eden.

Eden Film Production LLC owns the copyright in the 2013 feature film Eden, a survival thriller about a U.S. men’s soccer team that crashes on a remote Pacific island after winning the World Cup. In the film, roughly a dozen members of the team are stranded on the remote island for two weeks, the survivors split into two factions over disputes about conserving supplies and caring for the injured, and, after several survivors are killed as a result of infighting, the remaining castaways are rescued by a helicopter. 

Plaintiff sued the writers, producers and distributors of the television show Yellowjackets for copyright infringement, alleging that Yellowjackets unlawfully appropriated elements of  plaintiff’s film. The story in Yellowjackets takes place in two different time periods and chronicles the lives of former members of a high school girls’ soccer team. In the first time period, the 1990s, the soccer team crashes in a Canadian forest. Isolated in the woods, the girls experience and begin to believe in the supernatural powers of the wilderness, which leads certain of them to engage in witchcraft-like practices. The second time period, the present day, depicts the lives of the surviving women, who are affected by ongoing “witchy activities” and visions stemming from their traumatic experiences in the wilderness years earlier.

Defendants moved to dismiss on the basis that the works are not substantially similar—a required element of a claim for copyright infringement in the absence of direct evidence of copying. The district court granted defendants’ motion to dismiss, holding that under the “extrinsic test” for copyright infringement used by courts in the Ninth Circuit, which requires an objective comparison of the “plot, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, and sequence of events in two works,” there were no substantial similarities between the protectable elements of the two works.

With respect to plot, plaintiff conceded that the present-day timeline of Yellowjackets bears little to no resemblance to the plot of Eden but argued that the “entire” 1990s timeline from the series was copied from the film. Plaintiff claimed, for example, that both works allude to cannibalism. The court held, however, that the movie does not incorporate cannibalism but instead depicts an ongoing dispute about whether to withhold food from survivors. Similarly, the court rejected plaintiff’s argument that the works are similar because an assistant coach in Yellowjackets burns down a cabin and a trainer in Eden commits suicide. While plaintiff characterized both events as an attempt to “escape” the survivors’ dire situation, the court found that “these two instances bear little resemblance to each other as plot points.” While both works depict survivors attempting to escape isolation, trying to contact rescuers and splitting into factions, those elements are unprotectable scene a faire inherent to the survival genre, the court held. The only protectable similarity between the plots of the two works is that, in each work, the team’s head coach dies and is survived by his two children, who are stranded along with the surviving team members. The court found, however, that this similarity, standing alone, was insufficient to establish substantial similarity as a matter of law.

Regarding the works’ moods and themes, the court concluded that while both works may be “somber,” “brooding” and “darkly comedic,” those similarities necessarily follow from the “unprotectable basic plot premises” of survival stories. Even if both works examine the theme that all people possess an innate capacity for violence and darkness, these tropes are common in the survival genre. 

Nor were the characters substantially similar, the court held. Any similarities operated only at a “high level,” the court noted, and, upon closer examination, concluded that the characters are “fundamentally different.” For example, plaintiff claimed that the respective team captains, Slim and Jackie, are similar because each character is a highly talented soccer player. As the court observed, however, team captains are often talented and chosen as captains for that very reason. The characters were dissimilar in other important ways, according to the court: Slim is “an adult, male, Black, elite international athlete who serves as a moral authority and selfless leader to a band of survivors,” while Jackie is “a teenage, white, whiny, self-absorbed girl who, though formerly popular, is excluded, and eventually eaten, by her peers.”

Finally, differences in setting and pace undermined plaintiff’s claim of substantial similarity. The movie is set on a tropical island and occurs over a single timeline spanning two weeks. Yellowjackets, by contrast, is set in the Canadian wilderness and follows characters across two timelines separated by at least 20 years. 

Because plaintiff failed to allege that the works are substantially similar, the district court dismissed plaintiff’s claim in its entirety, with prejudice and without leave to refile.

Summary prepared by Frank D’Angelo and Keane Barger