Movie director Woody Allen has settled a $68 million legal with Amazon on Monday after a legal battle over the US company scrapping a contract at the start of 2019, as reported by CNBC.
Allen sued Amazon for allegedly breaching its four-picture deal, which was supposed to “finance and distribute his future films and to be his ‘home’ for the rest of his career,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in February.
The two parties agreed that the case should be rejected in papers filed Friday, as revealed in an AP report.
Allen claimed that he finished his film “A Rainy Day in New York” which cost him $20 million before being cancelled by Amazon, who then shelved the agreement for three more movies, the suit outlines.
Allen’s company, Gravier Productions, got an international release for “A Rainy Day in New York” as part of the agreement, including in France, Italy and Hong Kong.
In April this year, Amazon’s attorney Robert Klieger said that Allen’s comments about the #MeToo movement breached the deal, citing a magazine article in which he stated: “You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.”
Allen’s suit claimed that Amazon had dropped the deal due to “a 25-year old, baseless allegation against Mr Allen, but that allegation was already well known to Amazon (and the public) before Amazon entered into four separate deals with Mr Allen.”
The accusation comes from Dylan Farrow, Woody Allen's adoptive daughter, who accused her father of molesting her in 1992 when she was 7-years-old, an allegation which Allen has consistently denied.
