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LeBron James has been super busy lately, not just playing basketball. He started a company called SpringHill Company to make movies and shows. One of their new movies is on Netflix, and it’s about basketball. But there’s some trouble because someone says they copied his idea.
On November 14, a guy named Rob Grabow went to court.
He says LeBron’s team copied his movie script! Rob made a movie called The Year of the Dog and now claims that Rez Ball, another movie, stole his story. Rez Ball showed up at the Toronto Film Festival in September and hit Netflix later that month.
“Grabow states he had written a script for The Gift of the Game — and it was all about a Native American high schooler and his efforts to lead his basketball team to a state title. He claims the work was ‘a powerful basketball film that deals with issues of community, race relations, and poverty’ — but he says after he shared it with people close to Netflix, James and the hooper’s SpringHill Company ripped off the idea and repackaged it for a 2024 flick titled, Rez Ball.” – TMZ
The lawsuit says both movies have lots of things alike: plot, theme, dialogue, mood—you name it.
SpringHill Company started in 2020 by LeBron and his buddy Maverick Carter. They’ve made cool stuff like documentaries on Muhammad Ali and movies like Space Jam: A New Legacy. Oh, and they do TV shows too.
