What are the limits of parody? The creator of MacGyver wants to find out – Latino Review is reporting that he’s looking to sue Universal over their upcoming MacGruber movie, based on the long-running SNL skit.
Creator Lee Zlotoff is apparently working on a MacGyver movie at New Line, and he’s poised to drop the suithammer on Universal/Rogue, but not in an attempt to stop the film from being released. In actuality he wants to get money from the movie – to become a profit partner.
Could this happen? I don’t know enough about the law to say, but I do find one of the theses in the Latino Review article – that parodies can only be short form and protected by law – to be silly in the extreme. I suspect that Zltoff’s suit will come to nothing, and that this is something that Universal/Rogue considered in advance. You just can’t have two Watchmen situations – where the studio legal team utterly drops the ball – in as many years. I refuse to believe it.