ISLAMABAD-Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer and Netflix are being sued for copyright infringement over an unpublished script. A company has claimed the idea for the hit show was taken from a screenplay titled Totem, which was written by Jeffrey Kennedy.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday at a California federal court by Irish Rover Entertainment, the Netflix show copies Totem’s ‘plot, sequence, characters, theme, dialogue, mood, and setting, as well as copyrighted concept art.’ It was claimed Aaron Sims connects the two projects as he is said to have worked with Kennedy during the screenplay’s development, before then being hired to make Stranger Things’ concept art for its first two seasons.
Totem focused on a girl named Kimimela, or Kimi, who has supernatural abilities and helps friends find a portal to an alternate plane where they fight off its inhabitants, including a ‘dark spirit named Azrael and his army of Blackwolf.’ The lawsuit claims Stranger Things mirrors this concept, as it says: ‘In Stranger Things, one of the characters is a little girl name Eleven or El for short who has supernatural powers.