According to Deadline, it has just been announced that Karyn McCarthy (House of Cards, Ballers), a previous producer for the upcoming Disney+ Star Wars series, The Acolyte, will be suing Lucasfilm for heinously firing her from production of the show, an act which McCarthy claims was a breach of contract. The news of McCarthy’s lawsuit came the same day that the company announced that the highly anticipated Star Wars projects from Kevin Feige (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman, Monster) are now officially dormant.
McCarthy will purportedly be taking the Lucasfilm division of Disney to court after being pink-slipped by the Leslye Headland (Russian Doll, Sleeping with Other People)-created series last year after only a couple weeks of working on the show.
As Deadline reports, the purported story behind McCarthy’s firing is actually quite tragic, as according to the March 7 filing by Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro LLP, she was being pursued by Apple at the same time that she came on to The Acolyte to help run their new Colin Farrell (Banshees of Inisherin, The Batman) P.I. series, Sugar. After making the decision to stick with The Acolyte instead for a potential long-term commitment to Lucasfilm in April 2022, McCarthy was blindsided by the sudden and egregious decision to fire her from the team, an act which she and her legal team claims deprived her of possibly millions of dollars over the course of the show’s lifespan.
McCarthy’s agent David Morris even received an e-mail on April 11 of that same year from Candice Campos, the Lucasfilm Vice President of Physical Productions, who claimed that, “we really want to make this work!” The twelve-page filing in Los Angeles Superior Court states, “Two weeks later, without explanation, without reason, without justification, Lucasfilm told McCarthy it wanted out of the deal. By this time, the Apple offer was gone – Apple had to move on and found another executive producer for Sugar. McCarthy now had neither deal.”
Although upset by the decision, McCarthy was purportedly dealing with the tragic twist of fate in stride, chocking it up to nothing more than the spirit of show business, though she fully expected to be compensated for her time and dedication to the project. That was where things went horribly wrong.
According to McCarthy, when she went to Lucasfilm asking for the money she was owed, the major conglomerate allegedly denied even making the agreement in the first place, even though they were the ones who offered McCarthy to be a part of the project. McCarthy had accepted said offer in writing, and they had already sent her a memorandum agreement officializing that McCarthy had already begun working on The Acolyte. Instead, Lucasfilm purportedly offered to pay McCarthy only $5000 for a single day worth of work, an insulting proposition which McCarthy whole-heartedly rejected.
Given that McCarthy could have made nearly hundreds of times more money from her work on the upcoming Disney+ series, her attorneys Patty Glaser, Robert Allen, and Matthew W. Bernstein are asking for a wide range of unspecified damages to make up for Lucasfilm giving her the coldshoulder. At this time, both Lucasfilm and Disney have yet to comment on this “dark side” debacle.