Warner Bros.’ efforts to block the lawsuit from the Michael Crichton estate over “The Pitt” and its similarities to “ER” have again failed.
The Court of Appeal, like the Superior Court, ruled that the Crichton estate’s evidence supports a finding that “The Pitt” violates the frozen rights provision in the 1994 agreement because it is derivative of “ER,” Noah Wyle’s previous medical drama. The case will now proceed to discovery and a jury trial.
The disposition read: “The order of the trial court denying the anti-SLAPP motion as to WBTV is affirmed.”
The lawsuit hails from Sherri Crichton, Crichton’s widow, and states that Warner Bros., producer John Wells (who had worked on “ER”), and “The Pitt” creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, utilized a previous idea for an “ER” reboot and quickly refashioned it as “The Pitt.” As a report from the New York Times put it, the Crichton estates is asserting that “The Pitt” “is the ‘ER’ reboot they negotiated in disguise about as tricky as a pair of Groucho glasses.”
Wyle is fairly open about the fact that the project started off as an “ER” reboot, coming from an idea he had in 2020 and, watching the series, you can see the contours of the original version of the show. Like, how easily Eriq La Salle’s character from “ER” could have fallen into the role of the mentor who dies tragically. As the New York Times report suggests, there were even press releases ready to go trumpeting Wyle reprising “his iconic role” from the long running original series, which was based on 180-page manuscript Crichton wrote in 1974 called “Emergency Ward.” After the success of “Jurassic Park,” that film’s director Steven Spielberg and Crichton teamed up to turn the script into a television series.
Part of the old contracts to the show contained a clause that read: “Any and all publishing relating to ‘ER,’ any and all theatrical releases, any and all sequels, remakes, spinoffs and/or other derivative works (including electronic media, interactive and the like) shall be frozen, with mutual agreement between Crichton, Amblin and Warner Bros. being necessary in order to move forward in any of these categories.”
This frozen-rights provision gave them power over any reboot, spinoff or sequel of the show.
Even the structure of “The Pitt,” with each episode being a 12-hour shift, unfolding almost in real time, was borrowed from the pilot episode of “ER,” written by Crichton.
The ruling today, which involves a SLAPP suit, which Cornell Law describes as “lawsuits brought by individuals and entities to dissuade their critics from continuing to produce negative publicity,” shows that there’s still a lot of blood left in this lawsuit.
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