Tom Cruise's Top Gun Maverick Lands In Legal Trouble, Paramount Pictures Sued Over Copyright Claim

Paramount Pictures' Top Gun: Maverick garnered a lot of love from fans and also made a record-breaking collection at the box office for the leading actor Tom Cruise. However, weeks after its release, the film is now making headlines for being in legal trouble.

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According to reports, Paramount Pictures is being sued over a copyright claim by the widow and son of the original film's writer. The complaint filed in California federal court on Monday (June 6) claimed that Paramount did not acquire rights before releasing the sequel in May.

According to Shosh Yonay and Yuval Yonay, the rights to late Ehud Yonay's story was reverted back to them on January 24, 2020. The lawsuit says that Paramount has been on notice since 2018 and that the Yonays intended to recover the copyright under a provision that lets artists do so after 35 years. The Yonays have claimed that Paramount distributed the sequel without acquiring the rights to do so.

The studio released a statement after the suit was filed and said that the claims "are without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously."

The Yonays reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter in early May to which Paramount responded that the film had been sufficiently completed by January 24, 2020, and was not derivative of Yonay's article. Meanwhile, the Yonays' have claimed that the film is a derivative of the 1983 article and that Top Gun: Maverick didn't wrap up until May 2021, over a year after the rights expired.

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For the unversed, Tom Cruise's Top Gun was inspired by Yonay's original article about the Navy Fighter Weapons School training program published in the May 1983 issue of California magazine. It talked about two pilots in the course, the hotshot 'Yogi' and his friend 'Possum'.

Paramount Pictures at the time had acquired exclusive motion picture rights of the article and Top Gun was released in 1986.