The drama over the long-awaited trial between AMC and Frank Darabont, the developer of The Walking Dead TV series, over whether Darabont was paid his fair share of the profits on the blockbuster drama series, looks like it will now almost certainly continue until next year.
Last week, AMC requested that Supreme Court Justice Joel Cohen vacate and continue the trial until the COVID-19 crisis is completely finished, as they claimed that continuing the trial before that point would be too risky. Cohen ultimately agreed with AMC in his ruling this week.
Cohen ruled that the trial will be pushed to April 2022, with the jury not even being picked out until next March.
Darabont filed the case nearly eight years ago, arguing that AMC unfairly took advantage of its contract with the famed film and TV producer through the fact that AMC produced The Walking Dead itself, rather than licensing the show from an outside production studio. The issue with such an arrangement is that obviously AMC would not literally pay itself a licensing fee for the TV rights to a show that it would air on its own network, so profit-sharing, instead, was based on a figure that AMC said would stand in for the production licensing fee. Darabont claims that AMC manipulated that fee to keep it artificially low and since Darabont received a cut of the profits of the show, he alleges that AMC is unfairly hiding their vast profits from The Walking Dead from him, with Darabont claiming $300 million in lost profit-sharing.
Judge Cohen noted that the trial might still happen before April 2022, though, if the situation in the courts and its ability to host trials safely changes, noting, “If a window for the a five-week jury trial becomes available on the Court’s calendar before April 4, 2022, and assuming that the Court deems pandemic conditions allow a trial to be conducted safely at that time, the parties will use their best efforts to make themselves available for a joint trial of the above-captioned actions during that window, provided that trial counsel for the parties can clear their calendars, and the parties have sufficient notice to secure the participation of their respective witnesses."
Neither AMC nor Darabont released statements about the news.
Source: Deadline
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