A few years back, writer Charlie Kessler sued Netflix for copyright infringement, claiming that Matt and Ross Duffer — the guys behind Stranger Things — had stolen his idea for a sci-fi show set near an abandoned military base. Kessler dropped his suit literally the day it was going to go to trial.
But now, someone else is rising to continue Kessler’s work. Per The Wrap, Irish Rover Entertainment has sued Netflix for stealing the idea for Stranger Things from a script for a movie called Totem, by Jeffrey Kennedy, claiming that Netflix’s supernatural hit is eerily similar to Totem in “plot, sequence, characters, theme, dialogue, mood, and setting, as well as copyrighted concept art.”
Totem was inspired by a childhood friend Kennedy knew back in rural Indiana. He had epilepsy, which the friends thought of as his “personal demon.” The condition created “lightning showers” in his brain that would transfer him to an alternate dimension where the demon lived, not unlike how Will is transported to the Upside Down dimension on Stranger Things. Or at least, that’s the argument the suit is making.
Irish Rover Entertainment cites other examples. “In ‘Totem,’ one of the characters is a little girl named Kimimela or “Kimi” for short who has supernatural powers,” reads the complaint. “Kimimela helps her friends find the portal gate to an alternate supernatural plane and helps them battle the plane’s inhabitants; a dark spirit named Azrael and his army of Blackwolf.”
Likewise, in Stranger Things, “one of the characters is a little girl name Eleven or “El” for short who has supernatural powers. Eleven helps her friends find the portal gate to an alternate supernatural plane and helps them battle the plane’s inhabitants; a Shadow Monster and his army of Demogorgon.” Same thing, right?
The complaint also claims that the Duffers could have picked up on these ideas through a guy named Aaron Sims, who made concept art for the first two seasons of Stranger Things and who also helped develop Totem.
Netflix, for its part, is no more impressed by this suit than they were by the last one. “Mr. Kennedy has been peddling these far-fetched conspiracy theories for years, even though Netflix has repeatedly explained to him that The Duffer Brothers had never heard of him or his unpublished script until he began threatening to sue them,” said a rep. “After we refused to give in to his demands for a payoff, he filed this baseless lawsuit. There is no shortage of people who would like to claim credit for creating ‘Stranger Things.’ But the truth is the show was independently conceived by The Duffer Brothers, and is the result of their creativity and hard work.”
I think Irish Rover Entertainment has a hard sell here. Suits like this are particularly weird to me because Stranger Things is so obviously cribbing from all kinds of sources. And it’s ashamed about this. The Duffers have openly admitted that they’ve taken lots of ideas from Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and about a million other people who were popular in the ’80s.
I mean, if the Duffers really did steal this guy’s idea, then more power to him, but I don’t see this going anywhere.
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