Paramount finally gets around to issuing a $50 million South Park counterclaim against Warner Bros.
The massive legal battle over South Park's streaming rights is once again escalating.
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Tonight—two months after getting smacked with a $200 million lawsuit from its rivals over at Warner Bros. Discovery—South Park co-owners Paramount have finally gotten around to launching a counterclaim at its fellow media mega-giant. For a piddling sum, too: Just $52 million! It’s like they barely even care.
As we noted at the time, the original South Park lawsuit was launched because Warner Bros. thinks it got screwed over on the extremely expensive deal it made with Paramount back in 2019 to turn HBO Max into the streaming home for South Park—something it agreed to pay roughly $500 million for over several years, including the rights to stream what were then the next three seasons of the Comedy Central series. The company was thus legally livid when a) Paramount commissioned some South Park streaming content of its own under the assertion that they were “events”—described in more recent legal docs as “made-for-streaming movies”—rather than “specials” or “episodes,” and b) delivered three seasons of the show that were significantly shorter than what HBO Max was expecting. (Seasons 25 and 26 were both just six episode, after previous runs all ran to 10 episodes per season; Season 24 was even shorter, after Paramount retroactively took the two 48-minute specials it aired on Comedy Central in 2020 and 2021 and called them “Season 24.”)
Paramount’s counterclaim, filed earlier tonight, seems to be a lot more straightforward, and can (WE ARE NOT LAWYERS) be summed up in part as “Gosh, guess you should have bothered to specify how long a ‘season’ was. Now pay us!” Because, according to Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery has stopped sending those juicy ~$26 million payments it’s supposed to be sending over to pay for the fact that it’s still, well, hosting a whole bunch of episodes of South Park on its streaming service. (Check the legal cattiness, from the counterclaim: “Even assuming WarnerMedia is correct that the Term Sheet contains a
10-episode minimum for Seasons 24 to 26 (it is not), the total “missing” content amounts to 14 out
of 332 total episodes, or a mere 4-percent of the total licensed content. WarnerMedia, under its
own theory of a breach by South Park Studios, has no valid excuse for refusing to pay the license
fees that are contractually owed for the 96-percent of the content it admits it has received and
continues to exploit.”)
In other words: This fight remains delightfully grandstand-y and high-horse-ish, even as South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone (who, as co-owners of South Park Digital Studios, have been roped in as defendants in the Warner Bros. case) appear to be trying to keep their heads down on the whole thing.
10 Comments
I’m sure they could all settle this over a couple rounds of margaritas at Casa Bonita.
I’m really seriously astonished that a massive corporation somehow had a contract worth $500 million and their lawyers seriously didn’t include a provision on the total number of episodes they would be receiving.
One of the grievances for the writers strike is that the streaming giants have turned people who write for the whole season on a streamer’s flagship show into gig workers by cutting the episode count, so you’d think they’d be extra conscious about length and quantification fuckery. If it were me, I’d have specified a number of episodes, minimum & maximum length, and probably some general rules about format. It’s crazy that they apparently just went “give us a couple of seasons of South Park and we’ll call it good; sign here for a half a billion dollars.”
…maybe episodes and overall series length in minutes, also; then you’re not getting “each megabyte is an episode” kind of rationalization.
They need to sort it out asap because these short seasons are not it. As soon as it starts to feel like its getting into a nice groove, its over.
for most of its run the show did two 7 episode half seasons a year, so I’d say 6 ep run is alot closer to a hay-day SP run than not
Yeah, calling six 22-minute long episodes a “season” is certainly…something. I thought this latest batch was the best run for SP in quite a long time actually, and then just like that the finale came (and was unfortunately the weakest episode by far).
(WE ARE NOT LAWYERS)Glad to know my occasional disclaimer-ing does get read. (I am a lawyer, but not yours without a signed fee agreement.)My expectation is this case eventually settles, since neither side is really in the clear: WB Discovery failed to define key terms in the contract (based on what I’ve read), and the Paramount+ Specials violate the spirit (if not the letter) of the actual contract.
I hope it goes to court and someone shouts “RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!”
I suppose at the end of the day I don’t particularly care much about billion dollar companies throwing their own feces at one another, but I got a huge laugh out of the bad lawyering on the part of HBO with regard to their failure to define super important terms in a contract- lawyers who were no doubt from some white label boutique firm who were paid in amounts that reflect the fact that they should have seriously known better.