Netflix has been drawn into a copyright battle over Brazilian Formula One miniseries Senna by author Lauren Wild, who alleges that the title rips off a script he wrote when he was in talks to be the showrunner for the production.
The show follows the life and career of Ayrton Senna leading up to his death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. He’s something of an icon in the sport, regularly recognized as among the best drivers of all time. Eager to draw the global F1 crowd, Netflix reportedly dropped north of $170 million into the series. It was filmed in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, with Gullane producing the title.
In his lawsuit, Wild says that he met in 2013 then-Sony Pictures exec T. Paul Miller, who expressed interest about a project he was developing around Senna. Years later, Miller, now at Warner Bros. Entertainment handling international content strategy, introduced him to Andrew Lazar (American Sniper) to discuss a Senna feature being handled by Gullane.
Wild was told that Gullane’s script needed major revisions, which led him to start working with Warner Bros. about coming onto the production, the lawsuit says. The studio later sent Wild’s treatment of the script and his other work on Senna to Gabriel Lacerda, a producer for Gullane. Due to the volume of content, plans shifted from a feature to a miniseries, according to the complaint.
From 2016 to 2018, Wild wrote 11 episodes for the show, titled “Built for Speed: Senna,” which has been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and Writers Guild of America. At Lacerda’s request, Wild sent the producer the first six episodes of his script. Around this time, Fabiano Gullane, a partner at the production company, offered him a job as the showrunner of the miniseries and cowriter on a Senna feature, per the lawsuit. Wild retained a lawyer to negotiate a deal. Preliminary terms of a deal were drafted but no formal agreement materialized.
“Our goal is to be able to count with everything that you already researched and wrote, on top of your active participation in the writer’s room for both the series and the movie,” Gullane told Wild, the lawsuit filed on Friday in California federal court claims.
But in 2019, Gullane ceased communications with Wild, according to the complaint. He was informed that the production company was shifting resources to a separate and unrelated show.
In 2024, Netflix released six-part series Senna, which Wild alleges is “substantially similar” to his work. The writer, who released a book of the same name as his TV script last year, points to several characters and events he made up in his treatment that were included in the show. He faults Netflix for conducting “little to no due diligence before greenlighting” the series.
The lawsuit brings claims for copyright infringement, breach of implied contract, unjust enrichment and unjust enrichment. It seeks a court order blocking Gullane and Netflix, which declined to comment, from further exploiting the show.
The series was directed by Vicente Amori and Júlia Rezende and written by Álvaro Campos, Gustavo Bragança and Rafael Spínola, among others.
