Tonight—two months after getting smacked with a $200 million lawsuit from its rivals over at Warner Bros. Discovery—South Park co-owners Paramount have finally gotten around to launching a counterclaim at its fellow media mega-giant. For a piddling sum, too: Just $52 million! It’s like they barely even care.
As we noted at the time, the original South Park lawsuit was launched because Warner Bros. thinks it got screwed over on the extremely expensive deal it made with Paramount back in 2019 to turn HBO Max into the streaming home for South Park—something it agreed to pay roughly $500 million for over several years, including the rights to stream what were then the next three seasons of the Comedy Central series. The company was thus legally livid when a) Paramount commissioned some South Park streaming content of its own under the assertion that they were “events”—described in more recent legal docs as “made-for-streaming movies”—rather than “specials” or “episodes,” and b) delivered three seasons of the show that were significantly shorter than what HBO Max was expecting. (Seasons 25 and 26 were both just six episode, after previous runs all ran to 10 episodes per season; Season 24 was even shorter, after Paramount retroactively took the two 48-minute specials it aired on Comedy Central in 2020 and 2021 and called them “Season 24.”)
Paramount’s counterclaim, filed earlier tonight, seems to be a lot more straightforward, and can (WE ARE NOT LAWYERS) be summed up in part as “Gosh, guess you should have bothered to specify how long a ‘season’ was. Now pay us!” Because, according to Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery has stopped sending those juicy ~$26 million payments it’s supposed to be sending over to pay for the fact that it’s still, well, hosting a whole bunch of episodes of South Park on its streaming service. (Check the legal cattiness, from the counterclaim: “Even assuming WarnerMedia is correct that the Term Sheet contains a 10-episode minimum for Seasons 24 to 26 (it is not), the total “missing” content amounts to 14 out of 332 total episodes, or a mere 4-percent of the total licensed content. WarnerMedia, under its own theory of a breach by South Park Studios, has no valid excuse for refusing to pay the license fees that are contractually owed for the 96-percent of the content it admits it has received and continues to exploit.”)
In other words: This fight remains delightfully grandstand-y and high-horse-ish, even as South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone (who, as co-owners of South Park Digital Studios, have been roped in as defendants in the Warner Bros. case) appear to be trying to keep their heads down on the whole thing.
