The lawyer representing Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s Together movie has responded to the recent lawsuit.
Together is a new supernatural body horror movie releasing in theaters this coming August. It stars Franco and Brie, who are married in real life, as a couple who encounter a supernatural force that causes horrific changes in their bodies. The movie is being released in United States theaters by Neon on July 30, 2025.
In May 2025, the producers of a movie called Better Half sued Together for being a “blatant ripoff” of their film. According to Variety, the producers of Better Half offered Brie and Franco roles in that movie in 2020, which their agent then turned down.
“Both projects involve a couple that become physically stuck to each other through a mysterious force,” Variety’s article notes.
What did the Together movie’s lawyer say about the lawsuit?
In response to the lawsuit, attorney Nicolas Jampol argued in a May 21 letter that Together was “independently created” and that “ any similarities are generic and not subject to copyright protection.”
Jampol wrote, “Your client does not own this concept. Neither do our clients. It is an unprotectable idea, one that predates all of our clients and has been explored in many films, television shows, and other fictional works…Together is the opposite of Better Half in almost every way,”
Jampol further pointed out that Michael Shanks, who wrote the screenplay for Together, wrote a draft for the movie and registered it with the WGA in 2019, which would be more than a year before the Better Half roles were ever offered to Franco and Brie.
“Before your client ever submitted a script to WME, Mr. Shanks already had written most of the elements your client now accuses him of stealing,” Jampol said. “The simple truth is that none of our clients copied a thing from Better Half.”
The plaintiff’s attorney, Daniel Miller, said in a statement to Variety, “The defendants in this case are doing their very best to explain away the unexplainable, but the evidence speaks for itself. It is telling that they have refused to share the prior script they claim was registered in 2019. We look forward to sharing with the court why there is no plausible explanation for the staggering similarities between these two works.”
