After investing $3.3 billion in well over 100 films at 20th Century Fox/20th Century Studios, including the “Avatar” sequel, financier TSG Entertainment Finance has reportedly filed a breach of contract lawsuit accusing Disney of using Hollywood accounting tricks to cheat it out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The financier alleges Disney engaged in ‘self-dealing’ by diverting Fox films from a lucrative HBO license to its own Disney+ and Hulu platforms in an effort to boost them. In addition, it also reportedly alleges Fox engaged in ‘sweetheart’ deals upon licensing its films to the FX cable channel.
TSG started its relationship with Fox in 2012. When Disney acquired Fox in 2019, the lawsuit alleges Disney fired Fox staffers responsible for marketing and distributing the films TSG had financed – leading to the underperformance of those films.
TSG Entertainment Finance claims than an independent audit of three films, including best picture winner “The Shape of Water,” revealed it’s owed more than $40 million from just those films alone. The company suspects the total will be in the hundreds of millions.
Films that TSG contributed on reportedly include the likes of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Deadpool,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “The Martian,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Banshees of Inisherin”.
Comparisons are being made to Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney over the release of “Black Widow” in 2021, which also took aim at the pay packages of Disney CEO Bob Iger and former CEO Bob Chapek. TSG and Johansson also share the same attorney who also represented the “Bones” cast in their profit participation dispute with Disney/Fox.
