Guy Ritchie Is Being Sued Over The Gentlemen
Writer and actor Mickey De Hara is suing Guy Ritchie over The Gentlemen and is claiming it was plagiarized from his undeveloped script.
Back in 2019, veteran director Guy Ritchie released The Gentlemen, an action comedy starring some big names such as Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrell, and Hugh Grant. At the time, the movie, whose plot involved drug dealers, gangsters, and quirky characters, seemed like the exact kind of film that Ritchie (the director of films such as Snatch) would come up with. However, Variety reports that writer and actor Mickey De Hara is now suing Ritchie for allegedly basing The Gentlemen off of an undeveloped sequel script for Ritchie’s 2008 film RockNRolla.
Mickey De Hara’s relationship with Guy Ritchie goes back a long way, with the writer claiming that he collaborated with Ritchie on Snatch back in 2000. Following the success of Ritchie’s earlier film RockNRolla (which starred heavy hitters like Idris Elba and Tom Hardy), De Hara alleges he was commissioned to write a sequel to that film based on his own life experiences. Years ago, De Hara was arrested for possessing so much cannabis and cocaine that authorities thought he might be a drug dealer, so he seemed like the perfect guy to write a script that centered on drugs and criminals.
Fast forward to 2018, which is when De Hara says that he delivered the finished script to Guy Ritchie. That’s when De Hara says Ritchie dropped the bad news on him: that “the time of the gangster movie was over.” While we think directors like Martin Scorsese wouldn’t agree, De Hara accepted that Hollywood didn’t want such scripts anymore, and he assumed that things were over with this script.
This is where things get juicy: two years after allegedly telling De Hara that the industry didn’t need any more gangster movies, Guy Ritchie released his own gangster film called The Gentlemen. The lead character is named Mickey (played by Matthew McConaughey), a criminal who is trying to get out of the marijuana business. Mickey De Hara was also allegedly a criminal who got out of the drug business, but to hear the writer tell it, the similarities don’t stop there.
For example, Guy Ritchie’s film includes a character named Coach (played by Will Farrell) who has a group of fighters known as The Toddlers. De Hara alleges that his script had a Coach character who had a group of fighters known as The Baby Squad. De Hara claims that The Gentlemen even stole one of his scenes involving these characters fighting some youths and squirting vinegar into their eyes.
According to De Hara, when he texted Guy Ritchie about all the similarities, the director claimed that he made several attempts to reach De Hara but never heard back (a claim which De Hara disputes). Shortly before the movie had its digital release, De Hara asked Ritchie to be given a writer credit on the film. Ritchie allegedly said this would be impossible but offered to give De Hara credit on another film in the future, but as you might expect, the writer would rather get credit for what he has written than some random project that he didn’t even write.
In his lawsuit against Guy Ritchie, De Hara is trying to both get credit for writing The Gentlemen as well as $250,000, a sum which reflects some of the movie’s profits (the film ended up making $115.2 million at the box office). As of this writing, neither Ritchie nor his representatives have filed a defense or otherwise responded, but we’re confident we’ll hear from the director soon. Only time will tell whether De Hara has the open and shut case he believes he has or if this legal battle will end up becoming as complex and confusing as that insane accent Brad Pitt used in Snatch.
