Alcon Entertainment, the production company behind “Blade Runner 2049,” has sued Elon Musk, Tesla Motors and Warner Bros. Discovery over the car company’s use of AI-generated images that were used in a presentation of its new Cybercab and were meant to represent the 2017 Denis Villeneuve sci-fi film.
In court filings obtained by TheWrap, Alcon claims that Warner Bros. Discovery approached Alcon CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, asking permission to use images and clips from “Blade Runner 2049” in Tesla’s presentation of the Cybercab the next day. Kosove and Johnson “refused WBD’s request, objecting to their film being affiliated in any way with Tesla, Musk or any Musk-owned company.”
The lawsuit explained that Alcon did not want the film associated with Tesla in part because of Musk’s political views, which have become heavily scrutinized as reports have surfaced that the billionaire was using his recently acquired social media platform X — formerly known as Twitter — to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account,” the lawsuit read. “If, as here, a company or its principals do not actually agree with Musk’s extreme political and social views, then a potential brand affiliation with Tesla is even more issue-fraught.”
In addition to this, Alcon noted that it is currently working on product partnerships for the upcoming TV series “Blade Runner 2099,” including with other automotive companies, and did not want to create potential brand confusion by associating “2049” with Tesla.
In the presentation, Musk showed an AI-generated picture of a man in a long coat looking over the ruins of a desert city. The picture heavily resembles a famous scene from “Blade Runner 2049” in which K, the replicant protagonist played by Ryan Gosling, explores the ruins of Las Vegas.
Alcon believes that Tesla had an AI program explicitly replicate images from “2049,” and that Musk did so knowing that Alcon had refused to allow use of images from the film.
“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. Especially where Defendants had asked Alcon’s permission to use ‘BR2049’ and been so firmly refused, this was clearly all a bad faith and intentionally malicious gambit by Defendants to make the otherwise stilted and stiff content of the joint WBD-Tesla event more attractive to the global audience and to misappropriate ‘BR2049’s brand to help sell Teslas,” the lawsuit read.
TheWrap has reached out to Tesla for comment.
