Actor Sylvester Stallone and his production company are suing Warner Brothers over the movie studio’s accounting for the 1993 movie Demolition Man.
According to Stallone’s contract, he was due 15 percent of the gross earnings of the movie once it earned over $125 million, but the suit brought by his production company, Rogue Marble Productions, alleges that the studio simply stopped reporting to it after 1997, and when explicitly asked for a profit participation report in 2014, Warner Bros. said that the movie was still $66.93 million below the payout threshold.
Sylvester Stallone
Bloomberg News
When Rogue Marble questioned that reply, it claims, the studio sent along a check for $2.82 million with a one-page statement that “did not contain any detail for the figures presented, nor did it contain any detail covering the reporting period since the last statement” in 1997.
Stallone and Rogue Marble are seeking a complete accounting of the movie’s earnings from tickets, DVD, VHS and BluRay sales, and other sources, with the expectation that that will reveal that Stallone — “one of the greatest American talents of the last and present century,” as the suit describes him – is owed significantly more than the $2.82 million he was sent.
“The motion picture studios are notoriously greedy,” the suit notes. “This one involves outright and obviously intentional dishonesty perpetrated against an international iconic talent.”
Warner Bros. did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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