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Reese Witherspoon has seen a lot of success both from her career as an actress and as a producer. Described by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the most influential literary tastemakers in the book-to-screen business”, the 40-year-old actress is known for turning over half a billion dollars and earning three Oscar nominations for optioning Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl and Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild before they were published. She also produced and starred in the female-centric and wildly successful Big Little Lies. She is, however, being sued in relation to the former.
TMZ is reporting a woman named Leslie Weller is suing Witherspoon by claiming the film Gone Girl lifts from her 2005 screenplay Out Of The Blue. The Gone Girl novel written by Gillian Flynn – whom Weller is also suing – was released in 2012 so we’re unsure why this is only now coming to light.
Weller claims the focus of both her screenplay and the novel is on a married couple’s relationship where the woman is actually not the nice, normal, naïve housewife the reader would have you believe. She also says the book is structured in the same way (“everybody sympathises with the wife”) and both pieces of work feature a scene with a hammer that makes you think the husband might cause harm to his wife. We hope The Girl On The Train author Paula Hawkins is ready for a lawsuit as her novel – and countless other bestsellers – share a similar plot line and have been adapted for film.
