Lawsuit against Mark Wahlberg and The Rock’s HBO show gets thrown out
The ‘Ballers’ complaint was filed last December.
It’s been seven months since HBO and Ballers’s showrunners — the series’ star Dwayne Johnson and executive producers Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson — were hit with a $200 million copyright infringement complaint. Now, Deadline reports that a judge has dismissed the claims.Writers of Off Season, a series that never got off the ground, filed the suit last December. According to their complaint, which was posted on Deadline, “Stories, character traits, scenes, and incidents portrayed in the two works, Ballers and Off Season, are, in many respects, virtually identical and strikingly similar.”At the time the suit was filed, an HBO spokesperson said, “We are confident the case has no merit.” On April 15, HBO, Johnson, and Levinson returned with a motion to have the suit dismissed.In a Monday morning hearing in Los Angeles, the federal judge noted “the themes in the two concepts are widely different.” The judge also said that the similarities between the two series “did not rise to the standard of copyright infringement,” and the writers’ “claims of similarities did not hold up under examination,” according to Deadline.The second season of Ballers premiered on HBO on July 17.
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