A lawsuit is claiming that director Steven Spielberg and two Hollywood studios have stole the plot of last year's Disturbia from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic Rear Window.
Universal and Spielberg's DreamWorks studio are named in the lawsuit filed by the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust. It accuses the aforementioned of breaking copyright by making Disturbia without the permission of the Rear Window rights holders.
Rear Window was based on a short story called Murder From A Fixed Viewpoint. Hitchcock acquired the film rights in 1953 and the lawsuit argues that Universal/DreamWorks should have done the same.
"What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, [they] have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation," the lawsuit states.
Disturbia director D.J. Caruso previously admitted that Rear Window "was a big inspiration" for Disturbia which features a housebound man spying on a suspicious neighbour. However, he insisted it's not a remake.
"I embraced it instead of running away from it," he said. "I didn't want it to be a remake because that would be silly. You can't remake Rear Window."