Blade Runner 2049 producers sue Elon Musk, Tesla, Warner Bros. Discovery over robotaxi images

A production company for Blade Runner 2049 is suing Tesla and CEO Elon Musk, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging they used scenes from the film without permission to generate promotional materials for the launch of Tesla’s self-driving robotaxi. 

In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. federal court in California, Alcon Entertaintment accused Musk and Tesla of feeding sequences from the film into an image generator driven by artificial intelligence to create materials used during Musk’s robotaxi unveiling on Oct. 10. 

The lawsuit accuses Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery of direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement and false endorsement.

During his presentation, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner 2049. 

“You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future,” he said. 

“It was hardly coincidental that the only specific Hollywood film which Musk actually discussed to pitch his new, fully autonomous, AI-driven cybercab was BR2049 — a film which just happens to feature a strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car throughout the story,” reads the lawsuit.

Tesla partnered with Warner Bros. for the unveiling, which was done from a studio lot, according to the lawsuit. At the presentation, Musk arrived in a cybercab before showing an image of a male figure wearing a trench coat as he surveys the abandoned ruins of a city bathed in a misty, orange light. In the upper left corner, the words “Not This” appear superimposed on part of the sky.

“Musk tried awkwardly to explain why he was showing the audience a picture of BR2049 when he was supposed to be talking about his new product. He really had no credible reason,” the lawsuit says. 

The presentation “was clearly intended to read visually either as an actual still image from BR2049‘s iconic sequence of K [Ryan Gosling’s character] exploring the ruined Las Vegas or as a minimally stylized copy of one,” the lawsuit says.

Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery did not reply to requests for comments from CBC News at the time of publication. 

Alcon Entertainment said it had specifically denied a request from Warner Bros. Discovery to use material from the film at the launch event.

The production company didn’t want to be associated with Tesla or Musk because of what it called “Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behaviour, which sometimes veers into hate speech,” the lawsuit says.

“The financial magnitude of the misappropriation here was substantial,” the lawsuit says.

“Alcon has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars building the BR2049 brand into the famous mark that it now is. Prior actual BR2049 contracts linking automotive brands to the picture have had dollar price tags in the eight figures.”

The company, which is in talks with other automotive brands for partnerships on a Blade Runner 2099 television series currently in production, claims in the lawsuit that the defendants’ conduct is “likely to cause confusion among Alcon’s potential brand partner customers.”

Alcon Entertainment is seeking unspecified damages, as well as a court order barring Tesla from further distributing the disputed promotional materials.