A YouTuber has accused Warner Bros. of copying some of his fight scenes for the 2015 film Batman Vs. Robin. Now, after uploading a YouTube video pointing out what he said were the lifted ideas, he appears to be contemplating a lawsuit against the studio.
Earlier this month, Kwonkicker, who has 337,000 subscribers, posted a video in which he wrote, “It looks like an action sequence may have been lifted from my web series ‘Slug Street Scrappers,’ and then inserted into the Warner Bros/DC animated film, Batman vs Robin.”
According to Kwonkicker, the original fight sequence was uploaded to another one of his YouTube channels called whirlwindaction in 2012, three years before the movie was released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ki58kVgozI
As Kwonkicker said in his video, he began filming “Slug Street Scrappers” because he was inspired by old video games like Street Fighter and Streets of Rage.
He said he was recently made aware of the similar choreography between his work and the film.
“You can’t really copyright a martial arts move or a sequence of martial arts moves. But this seems to be a little bit more than just coincidence,” he said. “It seems to be that they used the footage of ‘Slug Street Scrapers’ … as reference for the film. Not just of the art, but of the same angles, the tempo, even the sound overlays … You can’t do that by accident. … It just seems like they straight up lifted it.”
In an updated posted to his channel on Sunday, Kwonkicker wrote he had tried contacting Warner Bros. and DC “in a friendly manner” but that his emails have not been returned. He also said that if any attorney was interested in working with him, he’d be interested in hearing from them.
“To reiterate,” he wrote, “I would not care if all they did was to use the same sequence of fight moves. The fight choreography by itself isn’t the actual issue, as similar choreography is bound to happen from time to time in action films. My primary issue is that it looks as if they straight up TRACED OVER the sequence from my film frame-by-frame, using a combination of the same tempo, same moves, same camera angles, same edits, and the body outlines of my characters. In other words, my issue is that it appears as if they rotoscoped the sequence without asking permission.”
A Daily Dot message to Warner Bros. on Tuesday was not immediately returned.
H/T Comicbook.com
