10 terrible movies that deserved to be sued

In Hollywood, bad movies are as inevitable as awkward Oscar hosts and franchises that nobody asked for. But no matter how bad the Home Alone 4s and Dirty Grandpas of the world are, few movies are so thuddingly terrible that they cry out for legal action.

On the contrary, many movies that end up getting slapped with lawsuits are pursued because of how successful they are rather than how awful they are. Avatar, Frozen, and Rocky have all been subjected to legal action from people who either claim to have created the stories without being credited or to have been the real life inspiration for them and not received adequate compensation.

One of the most unusual instances of people coming out of the woodwork to sue successful films came after the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight when the mayor of a small town in Turkey called Batman alleged that the film had stolen the name of its main character. He even blamed the movie for a series of gruesome unsolved murders and female “honour suicides” that had occurred there. 

Occasionally, however, terrible movies that should never have been made end up being hauled into court for one reason or another. There are plenty of copyright infringement examples, but there are plenty of unusual ones, too. From furious investors to Mike Tyson’s tattoo artist, here are some of the most bizarre instances of terrible movies getting sued and deserving it.

10 terrible movies that deserved to be sued:

The Amityville Horror franchise

The Amityville Horror franchise has spawned an equally endless and messy string of lawsuits. It was all based on the real-life crimes of Ronald DeFeo Jr, who served a life sentence for murdering his parents and four siblings in their home in Amityville, Long Island, in 1974. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their three children, only to leave after four weeks, claiming to have been terrorised by paranormal beings. There have been at least two dozen movies based on these events, each more terrible than the last. But the lawsuits started almost immediately. 

The 1979 adaptation starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder as the Lutzes is a hokey B-movie full of cheap horror gags and not much else, but it was a big hit, and prospective claimants saw dollar signs. DeFeo’s lawyer sued the Lutzes, claiming that he hadn’t been given sufficient credit for helping them shape their story and alleging that the whole thing was a hoax. DeFeo sued the lawyer, claiming he had been more concerned about how the trial could be shaped into a book deal than proving his client’s innocence. And the Lutzes sued the lawyer just for good measure. Finally, in 2005, George Lutz filed a libel suit against the producers of that year’s remake starring Ryan Reynolds, saying that it depicted him as a murderous maniac.

London Fields (Mathew Cullen, 2018)

The 2018 pseudo-noir thriller London Fields stars Amber Heard as a psychic who has visions of her own death and enters into three love affairs, including one which she knows will lead to her murder. If you think that sounds remotely intriguing, you might consider reading the Martin Amis book it was based on. Critics tossed around words like “trashy” and “horrendous” when describing the film, and it holds a steady score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It was clear early on that no one wanted anything to do with the film unless damages were involved. It was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival when director Matthew Cullen sued the film’s producers for preventing him from having the final cut and failing to pay him. The producers sued him right back, alleging that Cullen had gone over budget, missed deadlines, and breached his contract by skipping out on post-production to make a Katy Perry music video.

Even Amber Heard got dragged into the proceedings when the producers sued her for $10million, alleging that she had made unauthorised changes to the script and refused to do voiceover work. Heard threw her own hat into the ring by claiming that the producers had violated her nudity clause by using a body double and digitally imposing her face over the double’s face. Somehow, this cesspit of legal action was less sordid than the film itself.

Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)

Battlefield Earth is a notoriously terrible film that is based on the work of one L Ron Hubbard, a self-proclaimed writer and the founder of Scientology. Starring Scientologist John Travolta, the film stumbles around something akin to a plot in which a man named (no joke) Jonnie Goodboy Tyler shelters from demons in 3000 AD. Travolta co-stars as the earth’s top security guard. With long grey dreadlocks and an alarming laugh, he offers his worst performance of all time in a movie that is unequivocally one of the worst of the decade, two bars that are very hard to clear. The film bombed at the box office and was received with such universal derision that its production company was sued by its own investors.

In 2004, Franchise Pictures was successfully brought to court by its backers for lying about the film’s budget to the tune of $31 million. It subsequently went bankrupt. A decade later, screenwriter JD Shapiro apologised for his work on the project, saying that he had only gotten roped into the project because he’d heard that the Celebrity Center at the Scientology hub in Los Angeles was “a great place to meet women”. Apology not accepted.

Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

The premise of Dannie Boyle’s 2019 rom-com Yesterday is an intriguing one – a down-on-his-luck musician (Himesh Patel) wakes up one morning to discover that The Beatles never existed and he can capitalise on his sole knowledge of their catalogue to become a musical sensation. As bad movies go, it’s on the innocuous end of the spectrum, but it never quite pulls off its central conceit even if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, and the romantic clichés are a bit too saccharin for their own good.

The fact that such a bland, sweet-natured comedy could stir controversy might seem unlikely, but there was subterfuge going on with the trailer, and fans were willing to go to court over it. Actor Ana de Armas appeared in the original trailer for the movie, leading viewers to reasonably expect her to be in the actual film. But her role was cut, and several angry de Armas fans sued Universal for conning them out of the $3.99 that they spent renting the movie on a streaming service. Eventually, a judge dismissed the case, saying that their injury was self-inflicted.

Giallo (Dario Argento, 2009)

Even the greatest filmmakers can make duds, and sadly, Italian horror pioneer Dario Argento is one of them. He got literal with his 2009 film Giallo, naming it after the genre that made him famous. Starring Adrien Brody as a police inspector who helps a woman find her sister who has been kidnapped by a serial killer, it’s a leering, seedy piece of work that even the director’s fans couldn’t get behind. It was a box office dud when it was released even though it had already made headlines over a lawsuit that Brody had filed against the producers.

Claiming that he hadn’t been paid, Brody successfully stopped the distributors from promoting or releasing the film until they gave him the remaining $640,000 he was owed. The case was settled between the parties and the movie was eventually granted a limited release, which was more than it deserved.

The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011)

Even for the small group of people who were inexplicably clamouring for a sequel to the 2009 bachelors-in-Vegas comedy The Hangover, the results were disappointing. This time around, Ed Helms is the one getting married, and Bradley Cooper, Justin Bartha, and Zach Galifianakis are there to make his pre-wedding brunch in Thailand twice as obnoxious and cringeworthy and less than half as funny as the first go ‘round.

There were probably a dozen lawsuits that could have arisen from this raunchy, mean-spirited trash heap, but the one that made it over the line was from none other than Mike Tyson’s tattoo artist. In the film, Stu (Helms) wakes up to discover that he has a face tattoo, which just happens to be identical to Tyson’s in real life. Tattoo artist S Victor Whitmill had trademarked the design and sued to stop the film from being released. Sadly, he was unsuccessful.

The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, 2021)

No one likes to see a great franchise laid low by an unnecessary sequel, but that is exactly what happened (more than once) to The Matrix. The Wachowski’s 1999 original was a landmark in the sci-fi cyberpunk genre, with jaw-dropping visuals, fight sequences, and a plot deeply rooted in philosophy and existentialism. It set the tone for a new wave of action movies, and it’s a shame it all fell apart so quickly. None of the sequels lived up to the first film, but it was the fourth instalment that really fell flat. Released more than two decades after the first movie, it failed to create the same sense of spectacle or originality, and it was a box office disappointment.

Not long after its release, its production company, Village Roadshow, sued Warner Bros, saying that the distributor’s decision to release the film on its streaming service at the same time as it was released in theatres had led to “abysmal theatrical box office sales figures” and damaged the franchise as a whole. Sadly, the only thing damaging the franchise was the movie itself.

Couples Retreat (Peter Billingsley, 2009)

To call the 2009 Vince Vaughn movie Couples Retreat a romantic comedy would be potentially libellous to both romance and comedy, but that’s what it was billed as. It follows a shamelessly contrived plot in which four couples go on a ritzy island retreat where they are all forced to do couples therapy. Hilarity does not ensue.

A year after the film was released, former model Irina Krupnik sued the producers and distributor of the film for invasion of privacy due to a scene in which co-writer and star John Favreau masturbates to a photograph of her in a bikini that was taken eight years before. The case was dismissed when the judge ruled that Krupnik had signed away her rights when she agreed to do the photoshoot, even though her lawyer argued that she had never anticipated the images would be used in such a publicly vulgar way. It might not have led to anything, but the lawsuit does hint at the overall tone of the film.

Monster-in-Law (Robert Luketic, 2005)

The trope of the terrible mother-in-law is a tired one, but that hasn’t stopped many a filmmaker from capitalising on it. One of the most irritating forays into this subgenre is 2005’s Monster-in-Law, a movie that was full of surprises off-camera if not on. For one thing, it was the movie Jane Fonda chose to get back into the business after a 15-year hiatus. For another, it was a hit. Directed by Robert Luketic, it stars Jennifer Lopez as a depressed single woman who finally meets the love of her life only to discover that his mother (Fonda) will do everything in her power to keep them apart. It veers dangerously close to slapstick and pedals in clichés, but for some reason, people went to see it.

Most libel cases are based on fairly convincing parallels, even if the lawsuit is ultimately unsuccessful, so it was unusual when a woman in North Carolina sued approximately 34 defendants, including Fonda, Lopez, Luketic, and several film companies associated with the movie for a whopping $154.8m. Her claim was that the story was eerily similar to her own life and a script she’d written in 1998 about it. “I felt like I’d seen it before,” the claimant said of the film via the Guardian. “I felt I could predict what would happen in the next scene.” Anyone even vaguely familiar with the genre could have said the same.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018)

The saga of Terry Gilliam’s attempts to get an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote made is the stuff of Hollywood legend. The director had first conceived of the idea in the 1980s, and when he finally secured funding to begin production in 2000, everything went wrong right from the start. Even for a director who is known for his chaotic productions and ballooning budgets, his luck was so bad on the film that it led to rumours that there might have been a curse. After a 2002 documentary covering the illnesses, freak weather accidents, and Spanish fighter jets that shut the production down, Gilliam finally brought his dream to fruition in 2018 with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good, and it definitely wasn’t worth the wait. Starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, it had plenty of promise, but it all came together in a bloated jumble that didn’t entirely make sense. But getting the thing out into the public almost didn’t happen, even at the eleventh hour. Just before the film was set to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, a former producer who had left the project in pre-production sued for an injunction, saying that Gilliam needed his permission to screen the film. This last-minute hail mary of a lawsuit was even more of a fitting end to the 30-year saga than the film itself.

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