from the and-here-we-go dept

Florida Man Wants $2 Million From Rockstar Over Parody Appearance In GTA6 Trailer

The folks behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise are certainly no strangers to lawsuits and complaints over publicity rights issues. GTA5 famously found the publishers of the game in court defending itself against the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Karen Gravano, ultimately winning both cases. Anyone familiar with the GTA franchise will have a sense of what is going on here. The series makes a regular habit of creating parodies of whatever is in the pop culture lexicon at the time of the game, with nods, but not faithful recreations, towards real life personas. In fact, most often, GTA will take multiple cultural references and mash them together as parody and off-color commentary on whatever it is parodying. All of that, of course, is speech protected by the First Amendment.

Rockstar’s latest iteration of its opus franchise is due to come out soon. A trailer for the game was released recently, showing off some impressive visuals within the game, as well as several examples of the exact cultural references described above. One of those was a nod to an individual known as the “Florida Joker,” who began making noise on social media about wanting to be paid millions of dollars as a result of the homage.

A Florida man is calling on Rockstar Games to pay him $2 million for showing literally one second of a character who looks like him in the reveal trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. Lawrence Sullivan, AKA “Florida Joker,” accused the studio of stealing his likeness in his latest TikTok video. But a Red Dead Redemption 2 voice actor wasn’t having it.

Sullivan, who got his face tattooed to resemble Jared Leto’s version of the Joker following the Batman villain’s appearance in 2016’s Suicide Squad, has been trying to monetize his recent flicker in the limelight. “Let’s talk,” he said in a public call to Rockstar after parodies of him and other viral social media figures appeared in GTA 6’s long-awaited first trailer.

This is extremely unlikely to go anywhere. As in the previous cases, what Rockstar is doing here is purely parodying a pop culture figure. What it is not doing is creating a faithful reproduction of Sullivan. Just having your face tattooed as a skinny guy isn’t enough to qualify as reproducing the personage of an internet sensation. As in the Lohan and Gravano situations, there are obvious nods to Sullivan and several internet memes in which he is featured, but that is not all that the character in the game is, based on the trailer.

Parody is a thing and it is protected speech. Rockstar has established a reputation for itself in this game series in which it parodies the current culture as a method for commenting on it humorously. And, as voice actor Roger Clark noted, its lawyers have been well-attuned to what lines can be crossed and what cannot.

One person who seems to think Sullivan has no reason to complain is Roger Clark, the voice actor behind Red Dead Redemption 2’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan. “[Rockstar Games is] lawyered up, man,” he said in his own TikTok video, according to PC Gamer. “They know exactly what they can and cannot get away with. If I were you, I would use the notoriety they just threw your way to your advantage. Capitalize on it somehow. You ain’t getting a job at Home Depot with that face.”

Disparaging comments aside, Clark is exactly right. The lawyers will have already vetted the content of the game to make sure it won’t run afoul of accusations just like this. And, to add, Clark is spot on that Sullivan ought to be using the homage as a way to boost his own notoriety and, perhaps, ability to monetize his persona.

I wouldn’t expect a lawsuit to be filed in this case as a result of all of this, but I’ve been surprised in the past.