Frank Miller was having a great career moment with the Netflix adaptation of his illustrated novel, Cursed (which Miller co-created with writer Tom Wheeler), becoming a smash hit on the streamer. Now, however, the comic book icon is facing a multi-million lawsuit over two of his other famous works, Sin City and Hard Boiled.
Stephen L’Heureux, a producer on the second Sin City film (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), is suing Miller and Silenn Thomas (the CEO of Miller's production company) on five different claims that L'Heureux's lawyers believe would amount to at least $25 million in damages. The claims are “compensatory damages, including lost revenue, loss of future revenue, damage to reputation, loss of good will and emotional distress."
At the heart of the issue is the TV and film rights to Miller's Sin City comic book series and Hard Boiled, a comic by Miller and artist Geof Darrow. L’Heureux apparently owns the rights to both properties, but he believes that Miller has blocked him from getting film and TV projects down with those rights over the years.
As the claim reads, "Despite....written agreements and repeated admissions and acknowledgements of L’Heureux’s Sin City Rights and Hard Boiled Rights, and having been fully compensated for granting those rights to L’Heureux, Defendants, individually, collectively, and through their representatives, have engaged in a systematic campaign to defame L’Heureux, to damage his reputation, and to deliberately and wrongfully interfere with his contractual agreements and his prospective economic gain from the production of the Sin City and/or Hard Boiled projects which he intended to produce pursuant to the rights he obtained from Miller."
L’Heureux claims that they had nearly worked out deals with a number of big name studios over the years (including major production companies like Skydance Media and big directors like Zack Snyder) but Miller kept getting in the way, including allegedly telling others lies about L’Heureux's ownership of the rights. In 2009, Warner Bros. (and then MGM) appeared to be moving forward with a film adaptation of Hard Boiled, with director Louis Leterrier attached. Allegedly, Miller and Darrow were even paid $250,000 to split (they later paid the money back when the project fell apart). L’Heureux believes that Miller was behind the project collapsing.
Miller's lawyers have responded by noting that they find L’Heureux's claims "baseless, and we will be aggressively defending this lawsuit."
L’Heureux is currently also developing film and television products for other comic book series, such as Tomm Coker's Undying Love and Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada's Painkiller Jane.
Via Deadline