MUMBAI: A former employee of James Cameron‘s Lightstorm Entertainment, Eric Ryder has sued both the filmmaker and his production house claiming that he has been excluded from participating in the success of Avatar though he spent two years developing the film.
Ryder filed the suit in the Los Angeles Superior Court claiming that in 1999, while he was a Lightstorm employee, he wrote a story called K.R.Z. 2068 as well as created treatments, photos, 3-D imagery and character elements for a planned movie the company was developing.
The K.R.Z. project was to be an "environmentally-themed 3-D epic about a corporation‘s colonization and plundering of a distant moon‘s lush and wondrous natural setting," he alleged in the complaint, it is understood.
The story allegedly included "a corporation spy," "anthropomorphic, organically created beings populating that moon," and a relaitonship between the spy and one of the beings that culminates in the spy becoming a leader of the group‘s revolt against the corporation‘s mining practices.
The complaint contains allegations of breach of implied contract, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, international interference with prospective economic advantage and negligent interference with prospective advantage.