As Yellowjackets fans eagerly await Season 3, Showtime has been hit with a lawsuit claiming the idea for the Emmy-nominated series was stolen from the 2015 Shyam Madiraju-helmed survival thriller Eden.
Filed Nov. 14 in New York federal court, the copyright infringement lawsuit also names Lionsgate and show creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, alleging that Yellowjackets “borrows heavily from Eden to the point at which they are substantially similar.”
“Comparing the Film to the Show’s plots, setting, mood, pace, stories, characters, sequence of events, themes, and scene/dialogue similarities, demonstrates that the two works, in most respects, are identical,” reads the complaint. “These substantially, strikingly similar elements leave little doubt that most substantive elements of Yellowjackets are copied from Eden.”
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The lawsuit — which cites common themes, plot points, setting, characters, mood and pacing — seeks unspecified damages and an injunction barring Showtime and the other defendants from further exploiting the series.
Eden is described in the filing as “a survival drama/thriller about a U.S. men’s soccer team that crashes on a deserted island after a World Cup match.”
Yellowjackets follows a 1996 New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team that crashes in the Canadian wilderness, where they are stranded for 19 months. The show alternates timelines to the present, where the young women’s adult counterparts grapple with the dark experience they suffered years before.
Lyle and Nickerson have previously noted that the 1972 Andes flight disaster, which led to members of a rugby team resorting to cannibalism for survival, served as a “jumping-off point” for the series.
“The real question is how did normal girls get from point A to point B?” Lyle told Forbes. “How do they go from having the most typical suburban teenage experience to doing the most extreme thing a human being can do? The show is a metaphor for teenage hierarchy. These girls were already ravaging one another in 1996.”
Season 3 of Yellowjackets premieres on Showtime in 2025.
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