On “The Butler” Dispute
by Harvey Weinstein
122 times in the history of movies, titles have been used and repeated. And our understanding with Warner Bros. was that this was just going to be the simple process that it always is.
Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy have a movie out called The Heat. Jason Statham is shooting a movie called Heat, Bob De Niro and Al Pacino made a movie called Heat and ten years before that Burt Reynolds made a movie called Heat.
And Unstoppable has been done five times.
Warner Bros. told us they were going to do the normal thing, the normal business they practice, and I think there’s an ulterior motive. My dad taught me to fight injustice. This is unjust. I was asked by two execs at Warner Brothers, which I’m happy to testify, that if I gave them back the rights to The Hobbit they would drop the claim. For a 1916 short? This was used as a bullying tactic. This was the big guy trying to hit the small guy.
If we run ads with The Butler, the MPAA is imposing $25,000 a day in penalties. We have to pull 5,000 trailers from the theaters, we have to pull our website down, all of which we complied with. And the movie’s coming out August 16. And 28 individual investors did it.
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