Advertisement
Company Town Blog

Mario Puzo’s heirs sue Paramount over ‘Godfather’ game

By Harriet RyanStaff Writer 
Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Taking it to the legal mattresses, Mario Puzo’s estate filed a $1-million lawsuit today against Paramount Pictures for allegedly cheating ‘The Godfather’ author’s heirs out of proceeds from a Corleone-inspired video game.

According to the suit, Paramount and Puzo, who died in 1999, agreed that he would receive a ‘significant share’ of ‘audiovisual’ products derived from his Mafia saga. Puzo’s son and executor, Anthony, contends in the suit that ‘The Godfather’ video game is covered by the deal because it includes characters from the films.

Advertisement

‘You hear them. You see them. That’s audiovisual to me,’ said the estate’s lawyer, Bert Fields.

Paramount declined to comment.

-- Harriet Ryan

Company Town Blog
Harriet Ryan

Harriet Ryan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2008, she has written about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Tom Girardi, and institutions, including USC, the State Bar of California, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with colleagues Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle in 2019. She and Hamilton won the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability in 2023. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

Advertisement