Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s Sundance horror hit Together is the subject of a new copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the production company behind the 2023 film Better Half.
The suit, obtained by Rolling Stone, calls Together, which sold at Sundance for a reported $17 million, a “blatant rip-off” of Better Half. It claims both films “center around a couple who wake up to find their bodies physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency,” with Together allegedly lifting “wholesale creative elements” — like plot, themes, characters, and dialogue — from Better Half.
Released in 2023, Better Half was written and directed by Patrick Phelan and is described as a romantic comedy about two people who meet for a one-night stand, only for their bodies to fuse together during sex. Together, meanwhile, has been described more as a body horror flick; written and directed by Michael Shanks, it stars Franco and Brie as a dysfunctional couple who move to an isolated house and find themselves contending with a supernatural force that compels their bodies to merge.
The film is also scheduled to open this year’s Sydney Film Festival.
Along with starring in the film, Franco and Brie (who are married in real life) served as producers. They’re named as defendants in the new lawsuit, along with Shanks, the talent agency WME, and Neon, which acquired the film at Sundance.
A WME spokesperson called the lawsuit “frivolous and without merit” in a statement shared with Rolling Stone, adding: “The facts in this case are clear and we plan to vigorously defend ourselves.”
According to the lawsuit, StudioFest — the production company behind Better Half, and the lone plaintiff in the case — sent Franco and Brie’s agents a copy of the Better Half script along with a synopsis in 2020. But the pair passed on the project, and the suit alleges the defendants did so “because they wanted to produce the film themselves and have WME package the project with one of the agency’s own writers.”
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The plaintiffs said they first learned about Together in January 2025 when they saw an article about the film that used a promotional image described as “virtually identical” to a promotional shot used for Better Half. At Sundance this past year, Better Half producers Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale attended a screening of Together, with the suit stating: “As the audience laughed and cheered, Jacklin and Beale sat in stunned silence, their worst nightmare unfolding. Scene after scene confirmed that Defendants did not simply take ‘stock ideas’ or ‘scenes a faire’ but stole virtually every unique aspect of Better Half’s copyrightable expression.”
Along with the premise of a couple who “wake up to find their bodies physically fused together,” the lawsuit lists several other similarities between Together and Better Half. These include using Plato’s Symposium as a “thematic vehicle to explore the idea that humans were once whole but were split apart, leaving them searching for their missing half.” The suit alleges that Together pulls a specific reference to the Symposium “in a virtually verbatim way.”
The suit even alleges that Together and Better Half share an ending with (spoiler alert) both couples “pulling out a vinyl record of the Spice Girls album — Spiceworld — in the scene where they accept their fate.” A main character’s “obsession with Spice Girls” is allegedly another similarity the two films share.
Additionally, the suit claims the similarities extend to themes of parental trauma, fear of commitment, and career fixation. In both films, too, according to the suit, one character is a “teacher who is ready for commitment,” while the other is a “commitment-phobic aspiring artist looking for their big break.” And Together, the suit alleges, includes a “strikingly similar bathroom sequence where the protagonists become attached at the genitals and attempt to hide their intimate encounter from a minor character waiting just outside.”
From Rolling Stone US
