Alcon Entertainment, the production company behind the dystopian sci-fi opus Blade Runner 2049, is suing Elon Musk, Warner Bros. Discovery and Tesla over part of an Oct. 10 presentation to unveil the car maker’s designs for hypothetical future products, including an self-driving “cybercab.”
The much-hyped event, which also included plans for a larger autonomous “robovan” and remotely operated Optimus robots serving drinks, contained few specifics about when any of these products would become a reality. Tesla staged all this on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, in hopes of leveraging some movie magic, but investors were unimpressed, and Tesla stock fell nearly 9 percent the next day.
However, Alcon’s suit alleges, Musk went a step too far in trying to burnish his pitch with Hollywood’s help. Ahead of the event, according to the complaint, the defendants asked for permission to use a visually arresting still from Blade Runner 2049 — one prominent in the marketing material for the 2017 blockbuster. Alcon refused, and “adamantly objected” to any association between their film and Musk or his companies. In place of an authorized image, Alcon claims, Musk instead used an apparently derivative, AI-generated picture while still referencing the film franchise by name. The original shows the character K, played by Ryan Gosling, walking from his autonomous flying “spinner” car toward the ruins of a Las Vegas destroyed years earlier by a nuclear dirty bomb. Tesla’s version similarly depicts a man in a duster coat looking out over a desolate, orange cityscape. (Tesla did not immediately return a request for comment regarding the lawsuit.)
Early in his cybercab keynote, Musk noted: “You see a lot of sci-fi movies where the future is dark and dismal, where — it’s not a future you want to be in. So, you know, like, I love Blade Runner.” That’s when the AI rendering appeared on the screen. “I don’t know if we want that future,” Musk continued. “Maybe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”
It’s not the first time Musk has sought to link Tesla products to the neo-noir aesthetic of Blade Runner. In July, he took to his X account to share an AI-generated image of Tesla’s glitch-plagued Cybertruck in a rain-soaked urban streetscape reminiscent of the original 1982 film and its legacy sequel. In a post last year, he described the vehicle as “an armored personnel carrier from the future — what Bladerunner would have driven,” apparently under the mistaken impression that there’s a character in the movies named “Bladerunner.”
These passing references seemingly did not rise to the level of potential copyright infringement. But the cybercab unveiling that featured an apparent mimicry of a well-known Blade Runner 2049 shot has been viewed more than 10 million times, according to metrics on the X stream, and 2 million times on YouTube.
In displaying the image, Alcon’s suit contends, “Musk tried awkwardly to explain why he was showing the audience a picture of [Blade Runner 2049] when he was supposed to be talking about his new product. He really had no credible reason. Musk ostensibly invited the global audience to think about the cybercab’s possibilities in juxtaposition to [the film]’s fictional future. But it all exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk are on the outs with Hollywood. Which of course is exactly what it was.”
Alcon’s filing further argues that Musk specifically wanted to connect Blade Runner and the cybercab in viewers’ minds because Tesla’s proposed design is a sleek two-door autonomous car, and Gosling’s character in 2049 pilots a two-door flying autonomous vehicle. The story also deals with advanced artificial intelligence in the form of humanoid “replicants,” and Tesla has recently sought to reposition itself as a robotics and AI company.
Notably, Alcon’s claims go beyond the typical protection of copyright (they report that Tesla’s actions could interfere with branding opportunities for an upcoming Blade Runner 2099 TV series) and touch on the question of reputation damage: “Beyond these more ordinary commercial issues, there is the problematic Musk himself,” reads the complaint. “Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.” It was for these reasons, the plaintiffs state, that they had denied Tesla permission to use their materials in the first place.
While he has yet to take legal action himself, filmmaker Alex Proyas, director of the 2004 sci-fi film I, Robot, loosely based on the stories of Isaac Asimov, also criticized Musk for what he saw as imitations of his designs from the movie. “Hey Elon, Can I have my designs back please?” he posted to X days after the cybercab presentation, sharing side-by-side comparisons of the movie’s robots and Tesla’s Optimus units, as well as vehicles that bear a resemblance to Tesla’s proposed robovan and cybercab. The event itself was titled “We, Robot.”
Musk, who has at times insisted that “the future should look like the future,” clearly takes inspiration from futuristic stories, whether it be Asimov, Blade Runner, or the novels of Robert A. Heinlein and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, two touchstones to which X’s Grok chatbot is a supposed homage. But as he cozies up to the MAGA movement and shares extreme misinformation in hopes of electing Donald Trump president, he may increasingly rankle the owners of the creative visions he likes to borrow.