‘Stranger Things’ Creators Are Going to Trial for Allegedly Ripping Off Short Film

One year after Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer were sued for allegedly stealing the idea for their Netflix series, the case is headed to court. On Wednesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied the Duffer brothers’ motion for summary judgement and ordered that the case be sent to trial — a big win for plaintiff Charlie Kessler, who alleges that Stranger Things is based on his 2012 short film Montauk. The Duffer brothers have repeatedly denied allegations of idea theft, calling Kessler’s claim “completely meritless” and “an attempt to profit from other people’s creativity and hard work.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kessler’s suit claims that the Duffer brothers ripped off Montauk after he pitched the idea to them during a party at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014 (two years after his short film debuted at the Hamptons International Film Festival). Montauk follows a small New York town haunted by “various urban legends, and paranormal and conspiracy theories,” some of which have to do with secretive government experiments. Kessler alleges that when he approached the Duffer brothers at Tribeca, he came armed with a feature film script titled The Montauk Project and discussed his plans to turn the short film into a bigger project. Kessler’s attorney’s claim that the conversation created an “implied-in-fact contract,” which the Duffer brothers allegedly breached by creating and profiting off Stranger Things.

The Duffer brothers have denied that the discussion created an implied contract. “Charlie Kessler asserts that he met the Duffers, then two young filmmakers whom Kessler never had heard of, and chatted with them for ten to fifteen minutes,” said defense attorney Alonzo Wickers in February. “That casual conversation — during which the Duffers supposedly said that they all ‘should work together’ and asked ‘what [Kessler] was working on’ — is the sole basis for the alleged implied contract at issue in this lawsuit and for Kessler’s meritless theory that the Duffers used his ideas to create Stranger Things.”

The brothers also claim that they have evidence that they began developing Stranger Things in 2010, years before they met Kessler. Emails from November 2010 show that the brothers were interested in creating a “paranormal” and “gritty eighties” show, and a Google Document from October 2013 seems to be very similar to the Stranger Things pilot. “Benny (renamed Will for the show) leaves his friend Elliot’s house, a bunch of kids are there, eating pizza, dungeons and dragons,” the document states. “Benny leaves on bike, hears voices, goes into strange world, taken by some evil force.”

Based off these documents, the Stranger Things creators requested that the court grant summary judgement — which the Legal Information Institute defines as “a judgment entered by a court for one party and against another party without a full trial” — but on Wednesday, that motion was denied. Unless something changes, the Duffers and Kessler are expected to go to trial, where a court will evaluate the details of the 2014 conversation. “Triable issues of fact remain to be determined concerning what plaintiff said, what he meant to convey by his conversation, and how the defendants responded before it can be definitively concluded whether or not an implied in fact contract was formed,” Los Angeles Superior Judge Michael Stern said on Wednesday. The trial is currently scheduled to begin May 6.

Netflix has steadfastly defended the Duffer brothers since the lawsuit was first filed in April 2018. “The Duffer Brothers have our full support,” a Netflix spokesperson told THR. “This case has no merit, which we look forward to being confirmed by a full hearing of the facts in court.”

Watch Stranger Things on Netflix