“Logo text Copshop writer Kurt McLeod has settled a lawsuit against his managers accusing them of having a conflict of interest when they negotiated his deal for the movie. Lawyers for McLeod and Zero Gravity Management founders Eric and Mark Williams on Wednesday notified the court of a deal to resolve the case. Terms of”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Copshop writer Kurt McLeod has settled a lawsuit against his managers accusing them of having a conflict of interest when they negotiated his deal for the movie.
Lawyers for McLeod and Zero Gravity Management founders Eric and Mark Williams on Wednesday notified the court of a deal to resolve the case. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The legal battle started in 2022 when McLeod sued Zero Gravity for breach of contract and fiduciary duty, among other claims, related to his compensation for co-writing the screenplay for the 2021 movie starring Gerard Butler. McLeod’s pay was tied to the film’s budget (with a cap of $125,000), which he was initially told would be between $3 million to $10 million, according to the complaint filed in 2024 in California federal court. He later learned that it settled at more than $45 million after Butler came on board.
The case raised questions surrounding potential conflicts of interest managers may have when they’re also producers on a film their clients are involved in. At the heart of this lawsuit: Were McLeod’s managers obliged to disclose the bump in the budget and renegotiate McLeod’s pay, which potentially could’ve decreased their own?
In Hollywood, managers, unlike agents, aren’t allowed to be producers on their clients’ titles. Still it’s their fiduciary duty to put the interests of their clients first.
That’s what the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals found when it reversed the dismissal of the suit from a federal judge. It concluded that McLeod could have obtained additional compensation had he known about the increase in the budget. The Williamses, for instance, had the option of tapping into their own producer fees, possibly netting the writer hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
There were two deals at issue in the case. In 2011, Zero Gravity and McLeod reached a two-year representation agreement, which gave his managers 15 percent of the writer’s earnings and the right to serve as producers on any film made from his screenplay. McLeod ultimately wrote the script for Copshop under that deal. After the representation agreement expired in 2013, McLeod struck another arrangement for the Williamses to continue serving as his managers.
In the case, the Williamses maintained that they did not personally represent McLeod.
The legal saga also included an arbitration with the Writers Guild of America over writing credits for the film over allegations that Mark Williams, best known for executive producing and writing Ozark, took undue credit for co-writing the screenplay. The guild concluded that the “story by” credit should be McLeod and Mark Williams, while the “screenplay by” credit should be McLeod and Joe Carnahan, Copshop’s director. McLeod accused Zero Gravity of fabricating documents to credit Mark Williams as an author on the script.
A trial was scheduled to start in March.