Will Smith Named In $1 Million Infringement Lawsuit Over The 2019 Film ‘Gemini Man’

Will Smith Named In $1 Million Infringement Lawsuit Over The 2019 Film ‘Gemini Man’

Movie star Will Smith and a few of his associates were recently hit with a million-dollar lawsuit.

An author accused the actor, in collaboration with numerous production studios, of stealing the plot for the 2019 movie Gemini Man from a novel he wrote.

Gemini Man

According to documents obtained by In Touch, the complaint was filed by a man named Kissinger Sibanda. The plaintiff, who identified himself as an attorney and science fiction writer, named Will Smith, 55, Skydance Productions, Gemini Pictures, Paramount Pictures, David Ellison and others as defendants in the suit. Kissinger Sibanda alleged that the movie’s creators ripped off its concept from a book he released in 2011 titled The Return to Gibraltar.

Describing his novel, Sibanda wrote in the suit:

“The book details an African American who is cloned and used in a time traveling program without his permission. In marketing the book, plaintiff Sibanda asserted that it would be a good fit for Will Smith as the lead.”

Will Smith

He continued:

“In 2019, Defendants released Gemini Man, directed by Ang Lee and starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, and Benedict Wong. The [film] follows a former hitman who is targeted by a younger clone of himself while on the run from the government…The defendants struggled to make the movie until plaintiff released his book in 2011, thereafter they changed the film’s marketing strategy – taking themes, plots, characterizations, context and cultural subtexts from the book to create their movie, Gemini Man.”

As you may recall, the Smith-led project was released to an underwhelming box office performance, only bringing in $173 million worldwide from a budget of $138 million (before marketing). Smith stars in the movie as a 51-year-old professional assassin named Henry Brogan, who’s planning for retirement before getting hunted down by a younger, faster, cloned version of himself.

Before Smith signed on to star in the movie, Gemini Man was reportedly in production for over 20 years with several A-list celebs attached to it at various times. The original screenplay was reportedly written by a man named Darren Lemke in 1997, though – as Sibanda noted in the suit – production companies struggled to complete the project, allegedly due to plot holes. Sibanda went on in the complaint to double down on his copyright infringement claim, alleging that the movie only made it to completion after all that time because of his novel, writing:

“The publication of The Return to Gibraltar, provided a fee meal for the defendants; not only did the book detail the cultural importance of the protagonist as a black person in a cinematic form but it explained cloning and its science in the context of a complete story; not just “ideas and facts” but a complete narrative pace and climax,”

Will Smith in Gemini Man

He added:

“In addition to the literary tool of deception in a cloned army used against the protagonist. Interesting enough, the protagonist in The Return to Gibraltar is a Harvard man, similarly to the younger version of the Will Smith cloned in Gemini Man.”

Sibanda is seeking $1.7 million in damages.

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