A dispute behind the scenes of last year’s smash ghost movie “The Conjuring” has become a legal house of horrors.
Tony DeRosa-Grund — a producer of the film, starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, which cost $20 million and raked in $318 million — has filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. and its New Line label seeking to block the Hollywood studio from releasing a planned sequel and a spinoff.
DeRosa-Grund filed court papers Friday alleging breach of contract and other charges for “failing to pay for the underlying rights” to a “Conjuring” sequel and a planned spinoff movie titled “Annabelle.”
The producer and studio were already in arbitration in LA over whether DeRosa-Grund had the right to sell a “Conjuring” TV series to rival studio Lionsgate.
DeRosa-Grund accuses New Line in federal district court in Texas of blocking his Lionsgate deal, as well as owing him a 5 percent cut from the box office of the first “Conjuring” movie.
The producer says he developed stories from the paranormal investigation case files of Ed and Lorrain Warren, the couple on whom “The Conjuring” is based, and sold rights to a handful of the 8,000 case files to New Line.
The studio released a statement saying: “New Line has been and is vigorously defending itself against these spurious claims in a binding arbitration proceeding in Los Angeles, and therefore the Texas filing is both procedurally and substantively improper.”