Netflix’s Seine-Set Shark Thriller ‘Under Paris’ Faces Take Down Threat Amid Original Story Lawsuit

Melanie Goodfellow
·8-min read

Netflix’s Seine-set shark thriller Under Paris could be taken off the platform within days of its release on June 5 due to legal proceedings brought by a writer-director who claims it was developed without his knowledge from an original idea he registered with France’s rights management body SACD in 2011.

An initial hearing on June 14 will pass judgement on a legal request by the complainant’s lawyer for the film’s release to be suspended while a second lawsuit around accusations of parasitism makes its way through the courts.

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Taking its cue from article 1240 of France’s Civil Code, parasitism is defined as one party following in the footsteps of another party’s efforts and know-how to benefit from their enterprise without seeking permission or making payment.

Set against the backdrop of the upcoming Paris Olympics and plans to hold the swimming leg of the triathlon contest in the Seine, French-language drama Under Paris revolves around the arrival of a killer shark in the waters of the famed river.

French genre maestro Xavier Gens directs a cast led by Bérénice Bejo in the role of a brilliant marine scientist, who faces her demons to save Parisians and athletes from a bloodbath, with other cast members including Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant, and Iñaki Lartigue.

Writer and director Vincent Dietschy says the feature resembles a project entitled Silure, that he began working on in 2011. Taking inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s classic killer shark hit Jaws, it revolved around a giant, carnivorous catfish that wreaks terror on the Seine.

Dietschy has put forward the theory that Under Paris producers Sébastien Auscher and Edouard Duprey gained information about his idea after he pitched it to French agent Laurent Grégoire at his offices in 2014, and a development dossier featuring a lengthy treatment started to circulate among other producers in 2015.

Contacted by Deadline, Auscher and Duprey refute Dietschy’s claims.

“We had never heard of Silure until the formal notice we received last year from Mr. Dietschy’s Counsel. Under Paris is an original project, and we’ll exercise our right to defend ourselves in the court proceedings brought by Mr. Dietschy,” they wrote in a joint statement to Deadline.

“We will be asking the Court to award us significant damages for defamation, because we’re facing a very aggressive, totally unfounded procedure, which has caused significant harm, reputationally and professionally.”

The pair first announced they were joining forces on a shark-themed project in September 2015 in a Facebook post by Kaly Productions.

Auscher is no stranger to killer shark films, having handled the French release of films such as Bloody Waters, Sharktopus and Dinoshark under the banner of his home entertainment-focused film company Program Store, which takes production credits on Under Paris.

Duprey produces under the banner of Kaly Productions with credits including 2019 breakout hit The Shiny Shrimps, about a gay water polo team, and I Kissed A Girl (2015).

Grégoire, who is one of France’s most powerful talent agents and founder of the Adéquat agency (which represents Bejo and Lyes), has not replied to Deadline’s request for comment.

In the face of the denials and promise of counter suits, Dietschy’s lawyer Maître Héloïse de Castelnau, who specializes in IP and labor law, is pressing on with two legal actions.

The first is a lawsuit against Program Store, Kaly Productions, Grégoire’s Agence Adéquat and Netflix for parasitism, the second is a summons calling on Netflix to suspend the film’s release while Dietschy’s claims are dealt with in the courts. Gens who joined the project at the production stage is not subject to the legal action on any level.

“Parasitism is where you use other people’s work, without making an exact copy… it will be a long and drawn-out case due to the analysis of the contracts and paperwork involved, and I wouldn’t expect a judgement for at least a year,” comments de Castelnau.

“The second filing is an emergency procedure asking for the interdiction of the film’s diffusion on Netflix due to an unlawful act, which is harming my client… the judge, in the case of an obvious violation of the law, could take the conservative step of suspending the film, because its diffusion represents an problem for my client.”

A decision on the latter request is expected at the June 14 hearing, which means the film’s initial release will go ahead as planned, but could be suspended from around June 15, depending on the ruling.

De Castelnau suggests Netflix had previously planned to release the film closer to the dates of the Paris Olympics – running from July 26 to August 11, but rescheduled to an earlier date following her legal letters which began in late 2023. Netflix announced the June 5 date on April 9, ahead of the April 22 hearing.

In the end, that hearing was delayed until June 14 at the request of de Castelnau due to the late release of a requested copy of Under Paris just three days before.

“We wanted time to be able to make a comparison between my client’s screenplay and the film,” says the lawyer. “This means the film will come out, but our hope is that during the hearing the film will be suspended until the final judgement.”

She adds that Netflix is not the main target of the legal action, even if it is named in the lawsuit.

“It’s not Netflix that we’re accusing of parasitism in reality as they joined the project in 2021, long after 2015, which for us is the year, when my client’s screenplay circulated a lot, and when we believed it was exploited without his permission.”

De Castelnau says her case is constructed around Dietschy’s meticulous record-keeping of all the paperwork and communications related to the development of Silure.

Per a chronology of events detailed in the lawsuit, Dietschy began developing Silure in 2011 and registered the project with rights management body SACD (Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques) in October 2012.

Across 2013 and early 2014, he developed a 23-page treatment for the feature in collaboration with screenwriter Emily Barnett which he re-registered with SACD in January 2014 as well as France’s National Cinema Centre (CNC) in February 2014, as part of an application for scriptwriting support.

Per the lawsuit, the registered synopsis at that point read: “A young policewoman, a diver at the Paris River brigade, finds herself confronted with an unprecedented natural phenomenon, embodied by a gigantic catfish, terribly aggressive and a killer of human beings. While the monster sows panic in the capital, threatening the mayor’s policies a few days before the choice of the city that will organize the Olympic Games, the heroine finds herself on the front line to face this figure of evil of a new kind. Helped in her fight by a young ichthyologist from the CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre) she becomes closer at the same time to her hierarchical superior, the commander.”

Dietschy failed to secure CNC screenwriting support but pushed on with developing the project and attempting to attach producers.

Per the chronology laid out in de Castelnau’s summons, Dietschy presented the project to Grégoire in January 2015, following an introduction by director Serge Bozon. Dietschy says Grégoire was enthusiastic about the project but that a series of meetings and communications did not lead to anything concrete.

According to the suit, from 2016 to 2022, Dietschy was focused on writing and directing the feature film Notre histoire (Jean, Stacy et les autres) at the same time as continuing to look for a way to bring Silure to fruition.

The suit notes that Notre histoire (Jean, Stacy et les autres) features a filmmaker character who is the process of making a passion project called Silure, about a predatory fish being tracked by a Paris River Brigade diver in the lead up Olympic Games, “quite literally” illustrating and pitching the project within the film.

According to the chronology, Dietschy was first made aware that another feature similar to Silure was in the works with Netflix in the spring of 2023 by actress Milo McMullen. On reading the press coverage, he saw numerous similarities with his project and decided to take the matter to the courts.

The case marks the first foray into the world of film and TV for de Castelnau whose IP work has been mainly with international fashion brands setting up operations in France.

“After Vincent Dietschy came to see me, I mentioned his case without naming names to people I know in the cinema world,” she recounts. “They all told me, ‘This happens all the time’. It was as if it were normal. That really shocked me, for me, the theft of someone’s work shouldn’t be seen as normal. It was as if it was integrated into the French cinema world.”

She continues: “This was a passion project for my client. People say, ‘but he first started working on it 12 years ago.’ Of course, he has done things in between, not least for financial reasons, but he never renounced the project and independently of that, you don’t have the right to steal the work of others.”

Contacted by Deadline on the case, Netflix declined to comment.

All eyes will be on the June 14 hearing.

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