Indian filmmaker Soham Shah has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, accusing the streaming giant of copying his 2009 film Luck to create the globally popular series Squid Game. Shah’s lawsuit, filed in New York on 13 September, claims that the South Korean series, which took the world by storm in 2021, is a rip-off of his Hindi-language action thriller.
Shah alleges that the Netflix show shares striking similarities to Luck, including its core plot of people competing in deadly games, where survival depends on more than just skill. Netflix has denied the allegations, calling the claims baseless and without merit.
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What is the movie Luck about?
Released in 2009, Luck is a Hindi-language action thriller directed by Soham Shah and produced by Dhilin Mehta. The film stars notable actors like Sanjay Dutt, Mithun Chakraborty, Shruti Haasan in her Bollywood debut, Imran Khan, and Danny Denzongpa. Despite the stellar cast, the movie received a lukewarm response at the box office and was considered a failure.
Luck revolves around a gambling kingpin named Musa Bhai played by Sanjay Dutt, who seeks out people with exceptional luck to participate in life-threatening games for high stakes. Players are put through a series of challenges, from shooting games to parachuting from helicopters with faulty parachutes.
The movie presents a dark theme of how luck, fate, and chance control the outcomes of these deadly games, as gamblers bet on who will survive.
The allegations against Netflix
Soham Shah claims that Squid Game, the dystopian thriller created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, borrows heavily from the concept of Luck. According to Shah, he wrote the story for Luck in 2006, and it was released globally in July 2009, including in countries like India, the UK, the US, and the UAE.
Shah claims that Hwang likely had access to the film due to its global release and extensive promotion. He further argues that Netflix has continued to profit from the similarities between Luck and the dystopian South Korean series.
In addition to the original series, Netflix has produced a reality TV spin-off of Squid Game in 2023 and plans to launch an immersive experience in New York in October 2024. Shah claims that these extensions of the Squid Game franchise continue to infringe on his copyrights, as they build on what he alleges are stolen ideas.
While both Luck and Squid Game center around life-or-death games, the contexts differ. The Netflix series features desperate contestants, drowning in debt, who enter a mysterious competition where they must win a series of childhood games with deadly twists to claim a huge cash prize.
On the other hand, Luck follows participants who are hand-picked for their unique luck and asked to test that luck in extreme challenges set up by an underworld kingpin. Although both stories share themes of survival, chance, and gambling with human lives, their execution and cultural contexts set them apart.
In Luck, Musa Bhai is obsessed with luck and orchestrates a deadly game for his gain. Squid Game focuses more on the moral and societal decay that leads people into life-threatening competitions. However, Shah argues that these similarities are enough to warrant legal action.
Netflix's reaction to the accusation against Squid Game
Netflix has responded strongly to the lawsuit, denying any wrongdoing. They’ve called the claims baseless and without merit, noting that Squid Game is an original work by South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk. The streaming service maintains that the idea for Squid Game was conceived by Hwang back in 2009, and there are no grounds for Shah’s allegations of plagiarism.
The lawsuit also notes that the show significantly boosted Netflix’s value by over $900 million, which Shah sees as further evidence that Netflix continues to profit from a concept he believes was stolen from him.
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