Less than a month after Sony whacked CBS with a breach of contract lawsuit over blockbuster game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, the soon to be Skydance-owned broadcaster is slamming Sony as a bad actor looking to snag the shows for next to nothing.
“Sony is attempting to obtain in court what it could not get at the bargaining table: the rights to the Series for free, by finding any excuse it can muster,” CBS’ outside lawyers Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP put it to now defendants Sony Pictures TV Studios, Jeopardy Productions and Califon Productions in a cross-complaint filed Tuesday.
In other words: Think hard before you try to pull out of these deals and mess with us.
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It’s worth noting that CBS in its first response to Sony’s October 31 suit cited the “billions of dollars of revenue” its long-standing deals for Wheel and Jeopardy! generated for the company. Billions of dollars will surely be the mantra for this case going forward, on both sides.
Today, CBS painted Sony as simply too heavy handed, and too greedy.
“Needless to say, CBS is disappointed by Sony’s decision to turn its back on the Parties’ longstanding relationship, to attempt to renounce the decades’ worth of efforts that CBS has invested into distributing and arranging for the distribution of the Series, and to attempt and escape the bargain it willingly made,” reads the complaint that went into the Los Angeles Superior Court docket today. “Therefore, through these claims, CBS seeks to hold Sony to the Agreements, and CBS remains committed to continuing to occupy its mantle as Sony’s trusted partner and distributor of the Series for the next four decades and beyond.”
As expected in a case like this, CBS is seeking a variety of damages from Sony. CBS also wants a court order explicitly saying that Sony “cannot terminate the Agreements based on any alleged breach of the best effort clause and covenant of good faith and fair dealing.”
On the flip side, it is that very notion of fairness that Sony said back on October 31 pressed it to take CBS to court.
“CBS’s failures and pattern of financially self-interested behavior — which at bottom come down to putting its own business interests over its contractual obligations to Sony Pictures — are straightforward breaches of the agreements’ express best-efforts clauses and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing,” the 19-page jury-seeking complaint that kicked off the court battle said last month.
Now it may end up being winner take all.