M. Night Shyamalan wins copyright case claiming ‘Servant’ show was plagiarized
Filmmaker Francesca Gregorini had sought $81 million in damages, claiming that Shyamalan lifted ideas from her film, 'The Truth About Emanuel.'
A federal jury’s unanimous ruling has cleared filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan of charges he plagiarized plot points in his Apple TV+ series Servant. Last week’s decision marks the culmination of a five-year legal battle where Italian-born filmmaker Francesca Gregorini sought $81 million in damages, claiming that Shyamalan lifted ideas from her 2013 indie film The Truth About Emanuel.
Shyamalan, the Montgomery County-raised horror filmmaker now based in Willistown Township, testified on Wednesday that neither he nor his collaborators had ever seen Gregorini’s film and called the situation “clearly, 100%, a misunderstanding.”
“This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” Shyamalan said, according to Variety. “I would have never allowed it. None of the people that I work with would ever do anything like that.”
» READ MORE: Every M. Night Shyamalan movie, ranked
Gregorini, stepdaughter of the Beatles’ Ringo Starr, claimed that there were too many similarities between her widely panned film and Shyamalan’s Philly-set show. Both stories feature grieving mothers who become unusually attached to baby dolls as their teenage nannies play along, caring for the dolls like real babies.
She sued Shyamalan, Apple, writer Tony Basgallop, and others involved in Servant in 2020, soon after the show debuted, calling it a “brazen copy” of her film. The charges were dismissed.
In 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals revived the copyright case, finding there were some merits to the dispute. Servant ended its four-season run in 2023. Apple motioned for a summary judgment last November, but Judge Sunshine Syke denied it and sent the case to trial in California, which began Jan. 14 and concluded in a week.
A copyright infringement ruling would have required proof that the defendants had access to Gregorini’s film and that the two projects were “substantially similar.” The jury ultimately ruled that Shyamalan and his fellow defendants did not have access to The Truth About Emanuel. The jury did not address concerns about similarities.
Shyamalan has been accused of plagiarism before. Pennsylvania playwright Robert McIlhinney sued the director in 2003, arguing that Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) was similar to his unproduced project, Lord of the Barrens: The Jersey Devil. In 2004, author Margaret Peterson Haddox claimed that Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) contained many similarities to the plot of her 1995 novel Running Out of Time. The director denied McIlhinney and Haddox’s allegations.