Apple TV has pulled the upcoming French thriller The Hunt from its schedule after allegations of plagiarism.
Apple TV has pulled the French crime series The Hunt from its schedule following allegations that it plagiarised the 1973 novel Shoot by American author Douglas Fairbairn. The six part series starring Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Laurent was due to premiere on December 3.
This all happened very quickly and quietly. Apple Insider reports that all material about the series was purged from Apple TV’s sites and social media accounts on November 20 – even the trailer has been yanked from Apple’s YouTube. However, a few independent accounts are still hosting the trailer, probably only a few quick steps ahead of a DCMA takedown notice, so let’s embed this thing and see if it’s still there tomorrow:
IGN also helpfully give us a plot synopsis:
Franck (Magimel) and his longtime friends enjoy spending their weekends hunting together, but one Sunday, they come across another group of hunters who start targeting them without explanation. When one of their party is shot, Franck’s friends strike back, sending an attacker to the ground. Barely managing to escape, the four friends keep the event a secret. Franck tries to go back to his life as usual alongside his wife Krystel (Laurent), but in the next few days, he starts to feel like he and his friends are being watched, or worse, tracked by hunters who are now hell-bent on revenge.
…which sounds like a pretty solid little thriller to me. But it also gives us some points of comparison with Fairbairn’s book, which was filmed in 1976 with Cliff Robertson (he was Uncle Ben in the Raimi Spider-Man) and Ernest Borgnine (you may remember him as Fatso Jetson in From Here To Eternity).
Weirdly enough, I’ve seen that flick – you’d be amazed what you can find on YouTube when it comes to films whose copyright nobody can be bothered to enforce:
But somebody can certainly be bothered now, it seems, so there’s a fair chance that embed is gonna disappear in a puff of copyright, too.
Citing French media pundit Clement Garin, Apple Insider posits that creator, writer, and director Cedric Anger is on the hook for this, saying that his actions “allegedly harmed” the production, and that the series “reportedly follows the main structure of the original novel, depicting a group of friends going hunting, but being attacked by other hunters.”
They also say that it is “thought” that Apple and production company Gaumont are considering legal action against Anger, although that “thought” seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
There’s a decent possibility this will all get sorted out down the track – Fairbairn died in 1997 and a cheque made out to whoever controls his literary estate could work wonders. But don’t expect to be cueing up The Hunt any time soon.
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