On March 19th, a Universal Pictures film entitled Repo Men will enter theaters. This film envisions a near-future world in which replacement organs can be purchased on payment plans available from a giant corporation. In the event that an organ buyer defaults on payment, the company dispatches “repo men” to retrieve the company’s property, which will presumably result in the death or at least the suffering of the victim. This is the backdrop against which the story in Repo Men takes place.
If this movie concept seems eerily familiar to you, you’re in good company. As many fans have already noted, this is exactly the same concept found in the 2008 Lionsgate film REPO! The Genetic Opera. So, is this an incident of film plagiarism? Well, as REPO! co-creator Terrance Zdunich notes in his blog, the situation (at least from a legal standpoint) is far more complicated.
To begin with, there can be no doubt about where this common concept originated. Regardless of whether or not the Universal film is “deeply inspired by” REPO! The Genetic Opera, REPO! is the older of the two, its release predating Repo Men by about a year and a half. Even in terms of origin, REPO! The Genetic Opera came first: it is documented as a stage performance in 2001/2002 (and, indeed, traces its origins back to the late 90s), while Repo Men is stated to have been based on the novel Repossession Mambo, which was published in 2009. Even taking all claims at face value and assuming Repossession Mambo spent several years being drafted, there can be no question that REPO! The Genetic Opera has the older lineage.
Certainly, this may be a case of an amazing idea occurring in two different locations (although one can hardly fault REPO! supporters for seeing something suspicious in so significant a coincidence). Alternatively, there may be something untoward afoot (it would hardly be a first time for Hollywood). But what people may overlook in this situation is the more universal lesson: the terrible reality that while you can copyright a story, you cannot copyright a concept.
The REPO! vs Repo situation should be especially chilling to any writer watching it play out. As Zdunich notes, to prove foul play in a court of law (the only way he and co-creator Darren Smith would be able to receive compensation from Repo Men) they would have to prove that their dialogue was being plagiarized by Repo Men. Presumably they could have tried to demonstrate a case of plagiarized plot or copied characters, but that would still remain difficult to demonstrate if exact wording was not copied. And unfortunately for them, this is not the case.
As far as the text is concerned, REPO! The Genetic Opera and Repo Men are two different films. They have different characters, their plotlines and events are distinct, and they do not share a common setting (certain broad parallels aside). What they do share is a concept, one that is critical to both of the films: the idea of a world in which organs can be obtained on payment plans, which can then be repossessed in the event of failure to pay. Without this concept, neither film could exist in an identifiable form. This concept is perhaps the most important part of REPO! The Genetic Opera created by Zdunich and Smith, and it is precisely the one major aspect of their creation that they cannot copyright. The most troubling issue here is not whether or not Repo Men is plagiarizing REPO! The Genetic Opera, but that Zdunich and Smith cannot benefit from the fact that their idea existed in an identifiable form first.
What is also troubling about this situation is that Repo Men will probably be a good film, just as REPO! The Genetic Opera is. Repo Men looks to have a significantly larger budget than REPO! (which REPO! could certainly have used, although one never ceases to be impressed by how well REPO! turned out in spite of its financial restrictions). Both movies have excellent casts, though it seems unlikely that the villain in Repo Men will be able to equal the majestic evil portrayed by Paul Sorvino. And Repo Men is certainly enjoying far more advertising and release support from Universal than REPO! ever received from Lionsgate, which will no doubt help its success. But no matter how good Repo Men proves to be, it cannot remove the sinister taint associated with it, a taint that reminds the artistic community just how vulnerable their creations are.
Let this be a warning to creative people everywhere: guard your creations well, but at the same time steel yourselves for the possibility of a Repo befalling you. You can copyright your stories, you can copyright your art, but you cannot copyright the beautiful ideas that give them their uniqueness and life. It is frightening and it is upsetting, but it is inescapable.
As an author, G. D. Falksen is understandably very concerned about the fragile position of creative people. More details can be found at his Twitter.
Interesting article. As a budding writer, these scenarios intrigue me greatly.
I’m very excited for Repo Men, and have never heard of REPO!, but after this article I’m going to give it a rent to see what’s what before I jump in line this Friday for Repo Men.
Thanks for bringing stuff like this to attention.
I may be in the minority here, but I have to disagree with you, G.D. Don’t get me wrong–if it can be shown that the makers of Repo Men or Reposession Mambo did plagiarize dialogue, characters, or even settings (at a more specific level than “a world where organs can be repossessed”) from Zdunich and Smith, I’m all for their being held liable.
But the fact that you can’t copyright an idea doesn’t concern me, or frighten me, or upset me. I’m glad that there are at least some brakes on the increasing amount of protection for intellectual property that we as a society are giving to creators.
I could go on about this at length (and indeed, in other forms, such as my A-paper, I do), but others have done it better than I, and I’m on Spring Break this week anyway, so the last thing I want to do is rehash my curriculum. So I’ll just say, as important as protecting intellectual property is, we should keep in mind that copyright (in the United States, at least) is intended as a limited monopoly for the progress of science, art, and society. A world where everything is protected doesn’t accomplish that.
the new movie looks familiar to me:
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=9772
While I admit that when I saw the commercials for Repo Men I wondered if there was a connection, I don’t know that there really is a problem here – if ideas couldn’t be endlessly re-used we simply wouldn’t have much of our entertainment. I mean, look at Avatar – it took the core idea from ‘Dances With Wolves’, but re-imagined it with 10 foot tall smurfs, and combat while a-dragonback. And while that’s an extreme case, almost everything is derivative of something.
Heck, that’s what the purpose of the whole SF canon is, these days. Nobody has to explain wormholes, hyperspace, Dyson spheres, or many other things, because today’s writers build on that, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, take things just a little farther, or in a slightly new direction.
Unfortunately in this day and age, everything is somewhat stolen from everywhere else. This is the ReMix Nation now, but I do think that the creators of the film did cut chunks from the great rock-opera. Avatard is one of the worse remixes in recent years… stolen story, dialog, music, and design. :)
“the terrible reality that… you cannot copyright a concept.”
Wow, I couldn’t disagree more. That’s not terrible–that’s wonderful!
Disregarding for a moment that execution is usually more important to a story’s success than the underlying ideas, where would we be if you could, in fact, copyright concepts? The fantasy genre as we know it would not exist, as countless authors would’ve been sued into oblivion by Tolkien’s estate. Tim Powers could go after anyone who wrote steampunk (and the word “steampunk” wouldn’t exist as the guy who coined it couldn’t have written in the subgenre to begin with). Avatar would’ve been pulled from theaters as the makers of Dances With Wolves (or possibly Pocahontas?) sued James Cameron.
The list goes on.
I understand where you’re coming from–nobody likes to see someone else nick their ideas. But the fact that this happens is a good thing for all creative fields.
Edit: I see that Artanian had the same comment re: Avatar. I hope s/he doesn’t sue me!
Dennis Etchison’s short story “The Machine Demands a Sacrifice” (1972) covers similar ground. It’s about scavengers rather than repomen though.
Thinking about it, there are actually quite a few things that still could be done with the concept. How about instead of just organs, whole bodies? In Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels one can switch bodies by just being downloaded into it. I recall an offhand comment in ‘Altered Carbon’ about paying for a sleeve (body) mortgage. What would it be like to be a repo-man for these, or to be a debtor hiding?
The possibilities behind this idea are just barely scratched, why would we ever want to foreclose being able to explore them?
It’s very common in Hollywood for two writers to come up with the exact same idea at the exact same time without either one being influenced by the other. Everyone’s swimming in the same cultural and social pool down there so your “unique” idea tends to occur to at least 50 other people due to living in basically the same set of circumstances. Those 50 people get whittled down to 10 who actually manage to write a script that gets read by an agent, then to 5 who get picked up by a studio, then down to 1 or 2 who actually get shot, distributed, and released.
I’m more under the mindset that this is similar to what happened here. The chances of someone seeing REPO! in 2008, writing a script, getting an agent to send it to a studio, getting someone in a studio to actually read it, shop it, purchase it, rewrite it a dozen or so times by two dozen different writers, get actors and a director attached, go through even more rewrites, shoot it, post it, focus group it, do reshoots and pick ups, re-focus group it, re-post it, send out screener copies, finalize it, sell it to theater companies, and get it onto a nation wide release in, what, 18 months, is highly unlikely to me.
When I first saw the Repo Men trailer, I thought, “Hey, that looks like REPO! only without the crappy music! Awesome!”