Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ is rip-off of 2009 movie, lawsuit says

Netflix Inc. has been accused by an Indian director of copying his 2009 film for his popular series Squid Game, as the company prepares to release the show’s second season later this year.

The director, Soham Shah, sued Netflix in federal court in New York on Friday, claiming the series is a “blatant rip-off” of his Hindi-language film Luck, which tells the story of a “group of desperate and indebted people. lured into a series of competitive games to win large sums of money” who later learn that losing the contests means death.

“The main plot, characters, themes, mood, setting and sequence of events in Squid Game are strikingly similar to those in Luck, defying any likelihood that such similarities are coincidental,” Shah said in the suit.

Squid Game made history in 2022 as the first foreign-language drama to win top honors at the Emmy Awards. The series was Netflix’s biggest release to date, costing $21 million, and viewers watched 1.65 billion hours of the show in just four weeks. It remained one of the service’s top shows for months, and Netflix announced in July that the second season would launch on December 26, with a third and final season due in 2025.

A Netflix spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email and call seeking comment on the suit.

This isn’t the first time Netflix has faced copyright claims for some of its most popular content. In August 2023, the Los Gatos, California-based company settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a writer who claimed that key elements of his previous script called Totem were used without his permission in Stranger Things.

Shah says Netflix continues to infringe on Luck’s copyright with derivative works of the Squid Game, including a reality TV competition and an immersive experience set to launch in New York next month. He says the show has boosted Netflix’s market value by more than $900 million.

Shah is seeking unspecified damages and an injunction to prevent Netflix from infringing its copyrights by marketing and streaming Squid Game, profiting from the sale of merchandise and developing other shows and works that may infringe copyrights in the future.

The case is Shah v Netflix Inc., 24-cv-6925, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

Top photo: Netflix Inc. web television series. Squid Game is displayed on a laptop in a staged photo taken in the Brooklyn Borough of New York, U.S., on Saturday, October 16, 2021. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg.

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