In a world that is often feeling a bit too close to The Walking Dead right now, the upcoming trial over the $300 million-dollar profit participation battle between Frank Darabont and CAA and AMC just got pushed back to later this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, a New York State judge gave the Dolan family run cabler a bit of a black eye and rejected its move to see part of the matter tossed out.
After years and years of summary judgement attempts, briefs, brittle letters and more, the initial seven-year old case was set to finally go to trial in late May. With COVID-19 essentially bringing the courts to a halt, Justice Joel Cohen now says the trial will start on November 2, 2020. Honestly that looks optimistic and lawyers on both sides pencilling in early 2021, I hear.
“Taking all the circumstances into account, the Court concludes that the relevant agreements are ambiguous with respect to the definition of MAGR as applied to the accounting issues in dispute and that material issues of fact remain for trial,” wrote the Empire State Supreme Court official in an April 10 decision made public Monday, striking down AMC’s effort to dismiss the secondary $10 million action that CAA and their client hit the outlet with in January 2018declaring that the once home of Mad Men “used a variety of shady accounting practices” to keep big bucks out of the accounts of Darabont and other profit participators.
Read the source article at Deadline