IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Avatar ‘2’ is hit with new copyright lawsuit, (Dec 18, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

And another may be ahead for the soon-to-be-released third installment.

A writer who claims his science fiction story was purloined by James Cameron in the making of Avatar 2 is entitled to compensation, a new federal lawsuit contends. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court just days before the third anniversary of the film’s U.S. release, represents the second time that the same writer has taken on Cameron over the Avatar franchise—although this time the lawsuit adds federal copyright law to the arsenal of weapons the author wielded, without success, in the first scrap between the parties (Ryder v. James Cameron, No. 2:25-cv-11854 (N.D. Cal. Filed Dec. 15, 2025)).

The lawsuit was brought by Eric Ryder, a 3-D artist and CGI designer. In the mid-to-late 1990s, he wrote what he describes as “an environmentally themed science-fiction” set in the distant future that involves “anthropomorphic beings, a vast oceanic setting, and a sinister, Earth-based corporation engaging in environmentally harmful mining operations on the moon of a gas giant planet.” He and his wife then made the work available to executives at Lightstream Entertainment, the movie studio owned by Cameron. Although it was at one point allegedly “greenlit” for development into a motion picture, the complaint alleges, the project ultimately died on the vine when Lightstorm told Ryder, in 2002, that “no one would be interested in seeing an environmentally themed science-fiction movie.”

That remained the situation until 2009, when Cameron’s box office smash Avatar was released. Ryder, feeling misled, filed a lawsuit in 2011 against Cameron and Lightstorm. Notably, the lawsuit—filed in California state court—did not claim that the director and his studio had infringed on his protected expression as embodied in his copyrighted work. Rather, he brought a series of contract and other common law claims under what is known in California as the “law of ideas,” a doctrine that requires, in certain circumstances, a movie studio to compensate a writer for the ideas—even if those ideas are not sufficiently fleshed out to be copyrightable—that it borrows in making a film.

But the writer was not successful in this first lawsuit. The California court granted summary judgment to Cameron and the studio, and a California court of appeals, in Ryder v. Lightstorm Ent., Inc., 201 Cal. Rptr. 3d 110 (2016), affirmed. The problem for the writer, the court found, was that Cameron himself had independently come up with many of the ideas for the film. And as to the dozen new ideas that Ryder claimed ownership of, the court of appeals emphasized, “[no] rational jury could conclude the 12 elements Ryder argues were added to the Avatar film beyond the scriptment were substantially similar to elements in [the original].” Thus, as Cameron and his production company did not use Ryder’s work in the film, the court reasoned, they could not have any liability to him.

Fast forward to 2022, and the release of the sequel Avatar 2: The Way of Water. This time, the writer contends, Cameron and his production company crossed the line that they did not cross in the first movie—entitling the writer not only to damages for breach of contract but also for copyright infringement. “Unlike with the first film,” the lawsuit contends, “Cameron can no longer plausibly claim independent creation. The similarities in the sequel are not limited to generalized concepts, scènes à faire, or genre conventions. They reflect verbatim and structural appropriation of Ryder’s original expressive choices, and they appear for the first time only after Defendants had full access to Ryder’s copyrighted and confidential submissions.”

The similarities that the writer alleges between Avator 2 and his work—which he refers to in the short form as KRZ—including the following representative examples:

• “The setups in Avatar 2 and KRZ are not just similar—they are the same: a corporation has a monopoly to extract a highly valuable resource on the exotic moon of a gas giant planet, and when this extraction is stopped, the corporation sends an agent to find out what has gone wrong and restart the resource extraction.”

• There was a “conscious choice” in Avatar 2 to create a new resource to find and harvest from the planet—and “with all the possible options … to choose from, Avatar 2 chooses the exact same magical natural substance that KRZ uses. The substance is even visually presented in Avatar 2 the same way Ryder chose to describe it in various KRZ Materials—as a glowing yellow substance in a glass vial.”

• “In both KRZ and Avatar 2, anthropomorphic, human-like beings—either androids or avatars—are on both sides of the conflict and must face off against one another. These beings share some of the same motivations and take some of the same material actions, further evidencing clear correlation between the two stories.”

• “The main human characters in both stories are a group of workers who are on a moon of a gas giant planet, either Europa or Pandora, to extract the above described highly prized organic substance that extends life.”

• “The settings, dramatic gimmicks, and story arcs in both films are also substantially similar,” in the “the action set pieces jump back and forth between the outside water environment and the inside of the base or ship and show the main android and avatar characters facing off in multiple action set pieces,” [b]oth stories also make a point of highlighting how the actions of the sinister corporation will cause the balance of this ecosystem to unravel,” and “Both stories also include a number of strikingly similar marine-oriented dramatic gimmicks, including, but not limited to, an illuminated 3-D map depicting the beneath-the-surface ecosystem, mini submarines, tentacled submersibles, and myriad deep-sea sequences, including a markedly similar remote-control minisub battle sequence.”

The complaint, which also names The Walt Disney Company and certain of its affiliates as defendants, warns that more lawsuits may shortly be on the way. Next week, the third Avatar movie is set to be released, the complaint notes—and “Ryder is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges,” that many of the similarities between the two works will continue in the third installment as well. Whether that results in a third lawsuit against Cameron and his production company will soon be known.

The Case is No. 2:25-cv-11854.

Judge: Snyder, C.

Attorneys: Daniel A. Saunders (Kasowitz LLP) for Eric Ryder.

Companies: Lightstorm Entertainment, Inc.; 20th Century Studios, Inc.; The Walt Disney Company; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Inc.; Disney Streaming Services, LLC

News: Copyright CaliforniaNews GCNNews