Nikita director Luc Besson fined for plagiarism

French filmmaker Luc Besson has been ordered to pay Hollywood’s self-styled “Master of Horror” John Carpenter nearly half-a-million dollars for plagiarising his classic 1981 movie Escape from New York, according to a report Friday.

The director of The Fifth Element and Nikita had denied that his 2012 film Lockout copied the cult futuristic thriller in which New York’s Manhattan island is a giant prison that has been overrun by its inmates.

Kurt Russell plays a government agent-turned-convict who goes inside to rescue the US President after his plane crash-lands there.

An appeals court in Paris ruled that Lockout had “massively borrowed key elements” of the earlier movie, according to a judgment put online Friday by BFMTV. In Lockout, Guy Pearce plays a wrongly convicted man who is offered his freedom if he can free the US President’s daughter from a jail in outer space which its violent prisoners have taken over.

Critics have long pointed to the uncanny parallels between the two films.

Box Office magazine called Lockout — which Besson wrote with Irish filmmakers Stephen St. Leger and James Mathers — “a sleek, slick and shameless rip-off of Carpenter’s Escape from New York” as well as its sequel, Escape from LA.

The Mandatory website joked that it was a “stealth remake”.

But plagiarism cases in the movie business are notoriously difficult to prove, particularly as so many action and sci-fi films share similar tropes.

Carpenter, who is best known for his horror films Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, had demanded 2.2 million euros in damages ($2.4 million).

Last year, the court found in his favour and ordered Besson, his Europacorp production company and his co-writers to pay a total of 85,000 euros to Carpenter, his co-writer Nick Castle and StudioCanal, which holds the rights to Escape from New York.