CBS Hits Back At Sony In ‘Jeopardy!’ Profits & Rights Legal Battle

Less than a month after Sony whacked CBS with a breach of contract suit over blockbuster game shows  Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, the soon to be Skydance-owned company is slamming the Kenichiro Yoshida run corporation as a bad actor looking to snag the shows for next to nothing.

Or as CBS’ outside lawyers Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP bluntly put it to now defendants Sony Pictures TV Studios, Jeopardy Productions and Califon Productions: “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.”

AKA: Think hard before you try to pull out of these deals and mess with us.

“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,” proclaims the cross-complaint filed today in LA Superior Court. “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.”

CBS are seeking a variety of damages from Sony, as well as court orders 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 flipside, it is that very notion of fairness that Sony said back on October 31 pressed them 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 this court battle said last month.

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