Stay Connected
Atlanta Black Star/Film
FilmNews

Director James Cameron Being Sued, Accused Of Stealing Avatar Idea

By | Published on December 9, 2011
CommentsComments (0) Add as a preferred source on Google i

A man has filed a lawsuit against the Avatar director James Cameron, claiming he stole his idea for the making of the 3-D blockbuster movie.

Eric Ryder, a self proclaimed Sci-Fi junkie, filed the suit in Los Angeles Superior Court. Ryder claims that in 1999, while he worked for Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment business, he wrote a story called K.R.Z. 2068, and created photos, 3-D imagery and character elements for a planned movie the company was working on.

According to the lawsuit, Ryder imagined a movie “about a corporation’s colonization and plundering of a distant moon’s lush and wondrous natural setting, the corporation’s spy sent to crush an insurrection on the distant moon among anthropomorphic, organically created beings populated that moon, and the spy’s remote sensing experiences with the beings, emotional attachment to one of them in particular and eventual spiritual transformation into a leader of the lunar beings’ revolt against the corporation’s mining practices.”

Ryder also mentioned that the company agreed it would not use any of the material he developed, “sharing in the commercial receipts and the writer and producer credits.” He claims Lightstorm argued “no one was interested in seeing an environmentally themed sci-fi adventures”, so they wouldn’t use his work.

Cameron and the producers of Avatar have been sued before over the film, and still haven’t been issued to pay out not even a penny for infringement.

Subscribe To The ABS Newsletter — Get our stories in your inbox.

Independent journalism still matters.

We hope this story was worth your time. For over 14 years, Atlanta Black Star has stayed Black-owned and independently run. We didn't get here by waiting on ad budgets that were never built to prioritize us. Our readers did that.

Corporate support for Black media has always been thin. Outlets like ours get roughly 1% of the $170 billion spent on U.S. advertising each year, and that margin is shrinking further as advertisers walk back the DEI-linked commitments they made in 2020. That's the backdrop. It's not why we're asking.

The wider picture isn't any steadier. Newspaper ad revenue has fallen more than 80% since 2005, and local newsrooms are closing at a rate of roughly two a week nationwide. When outlets go under, it's rarely the ones built to center a Black perspective from the ground up that get to stick around.

We know a request for support isn't why you came here. But without readers choosing to fund this work directly, the depth of reporting we can do at home and abroad shrinks along with everyone else's. If you're not in a position to give, that doesn't change how much we value you as a reader.

If you are able to, a recurring contribution does more for us than a single one-time gift, because it lets us plan the next investigation instead of just the next invoice. It takes about 30 seconds, no long form, no account. Thank you for continuing to support independent journalism and freedom of the press.

Give once Give monthly Support another way

Latest from Atlanta Black Star

Back to top