Atlas Shrugged lawsuit pits producing company of critical and box office dud vs. Relativity Media and Netflix
An Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 lawsuit is in the works.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, the company behind the box office bomb starring Zac Efron’s The Lucky One’s love interest – that’s Taylor Schilling – as Ayn Rand’s heroine Dagny Taggart is suing Relativity Media and Netflix for failing to pay a $1.5 million licensing fee to release Atlas Shrugged on home video.
Why Relativity and Netflix would agree to pay $1.5 million to distribute a critical and box office disaster like Atlas Shrugged is mind-boggling. Made for a reported $20 million, Atlas Shrugged generated a measly $4.6 million in the domestic market. The film’s overseas take is nil, as Ayn Rand and her ideology seem to appeal chiefly to right-wingers of the red-white-and-blue variety.
And let’s not forget that Atlas Shrugged has an embarrassing 6 percent approval rating and a 3.2/10 average grade among the “top critics” at rottentomatoes.com.
June 1 update: The Atlas Shrugged lawsuit has been dropped.
Movie news snippets: Gong Li to go Mongolian, Harrison Ford to return as Deckard – well, maybe
If all goes as planned…
Josh Duhamel and Julianne Hough will star in Safe Haven, the latest Nicholas Sparks novel to be transferred to the big screen. Two-time Best Director Oscar nominee Lasse Hallström (My Life As a Dog, 1987; The Cider House Rules, 1999) will handle the proceedings for Relativity Media. Hallström has previously directed the popular Sparks adaptation Dear John, starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried.
Carl Franklin will direct City of Night – not a movie adaptation of John Rechy’s novel about a roaming gay sex worker but a Training Day-like tale of corruption (screenplay by David Chisholm) set in the bowels of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Gong Li will be featured as a Mongolian princess in producer Gianni Nunnari and director Tarsem Singh’s English-language project about the life of Italian explorer Marco Polo, previously incarnated by, among others, Gary Cooper (The Adventures of Marco Polo, 1938), Rory Calhoun (Marco Polo, 1962), Horst Buchholz (Marco the Magnificent, 1965), and, for the small screen, Ian Somerhalder (Marco Polo, 2007). Gong, who referred to Singh as an “audacious filmmaker,” discussed the U.S./China project at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was one of the presenters at the awards ceremony.
Lastly, social media is abuzz with the “news” that Harrison Ford may – italics – be featured in Ridley Scott’s prequel (or sequel) to … no, not Alien (that would be Prometheus) but Blade Runner. In the past few days, someone somewhere claimed that Scott and Ford were in talks to have the veteran Oscar nominee (Witness, 1985) reprise his role as replicant-killing detective Rick Deckard (who, as it happens, may or may not be a replicant himself). Making things a bit more uncertain, Scott told EW.com the following: “No. Don’t know yet. Don’t know yet.”
“Atlas Shrugged Lawsuit, Harrison Ford Back as Deckard?” notes
Gong Li quote via Screen Daily.
Taylor Schilling | Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 image: Rocky Mountain Pictures.
*last modified in January 2026.