October 18th Hearing Date Set For Warner Bros vs Toberoff Case

Now that we are actually starting to hear some news on the Superman on film front, the legal fisticuffs bewteen Warner Bros and the Siegel and Shuster families is rearing it's ugly head. I'll let The Hollywood Reporter do the talking. See below.

As Warner Bros. inches closer to finding a director for its planned "Superman" reboot, the epic legal battle over the Man of Steel keeps getting nastier.

Warners filed a stack of legal papers the size of a tall building last night trying to persuade a judge to keep alive its claims against Marc Toberoff, the lawyer for the Siegel and Shuster families, who Warners claims improperly interfered with its key rights deals with the families.

As you'll recall, the heirs of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster acted to terminate the rights to Superman in 1997. Four years later, the parties were close to a settlement before Joanne Siegel fired her lawyers and hired Toberoff, who then filed a lawsuit against Warners. In a bombshell 2008 decision, a federal judge ruled that the notice of termination was valid, meaning that certain Superman rights would revert to the Siegel estate in 2011 and the Shuster estate in 2013. The clock was ticking.

Warners wasn't going to just roll over. With the help of an internal Superman "timeline" that was secretly dropped on the studio's doorstep by a former Toberoff associate, in May it launched an aggressive counterattack with a new lawsuit against Toberoff and his clients, alleging the lawyer manipulated the families into repudiating their deals with Warners-owned DC Comics and entering into deals that would give Toberoff almost half the revenue from the property.

Toberoff responded by filing several motions to dismiss the case, including an anti-SLAPP motion that argued the studio was only trying to "delay the final reckoning" by employing a "desperate and cynical strategy." He also tried to get the "timeline" declared privileged, but that effort was denied.

Now, in five separate motions filed by Warners attorney Dan Petrocelli and a team from O'Melveny & Myers, the studio says Toberoff is trying to shield himself from liability for interfering with his clients' contracts with the studio by saying he was merely a lawyer doing his job.

Warners says that its claims in the lawsuit "unmistakenly and unambiguously challenge Toberoff's business practices, not his practice of law," according to the court papers.

The studio claims that Toberoff engineered a series of "consent agreements" with the Siegel and Shuster families that both interfered with its rights as well as put Toberoff and his entertainment companies in the position to reap huge dividends from a new copyright assignment. In one of his own voluminous motions, Toberoff points out that the terminations were lawful and scoffs that the families had any obligation to give Warners an exclusive first crack at regaining control over the properties.

A hearing date in the case is set for Oct. 18, although there's a chance the court could be so overwhelmed by the legal paperwork that there will be a delay. Depositions, including those of the Siegels, Shusters and Toberoff himself, are scheduled to begin in mid-November. The future of the "Superman" empire, hundreds of millions of dollars, and perhaps even the future of power in Hollywood will be at stake.

Comments

[moviefan]

i hope all the legal stuff gets settled and works out for the best of all parties. I still wished we didnt have all these legal issues in the first place.