Apple TV’s 6-Year Legal Battle With M. Night Shyamalan Officially Ends

Like many businesses, Hollywood faces legal challenges. Courts regularly hear cases involving working conditions, breach of contract, and even intellectual property rights. Many shows have faced legal trouble after someone sues for intellectual property theft. Massive hits like The Pitt, Yellowstone, and P-Valley have been engaged in years-long battles after being accused of stealing concepts from other creatives. Many of these cases take years to resolve, and in 2020, Apple TV and M. Night Shyamalan found themselves engaged in a legal fight over Servant.

In the thriller created by mystery maestro Shyamalan, when a Philadelphia couple loses their baby, their marriage suffers, and in an attempt to repair it, they invite a mysterious force into their home. The series premiered in 2019 and stars Lauren Ambrose (Dorothy), Toby Kebbell (Sean Turner), Rupert Grint (Julian), and Nell Tiger Free (Leanne). A year later, filmmaker Francesca Gregorini filed a lawsuit alleging that Servant copied the plot, tone, characters, and specific visual styling of her 2013 indie movie The Truth About Emanuel, which similarly featured a grieving mother caring for a lifelike reborn doll and hiring a nanny who bonds with the substitute baby.

A judge dismissed the case in 2020 after finding that the works bore little resemblance. He fined Gregorini $160,000 in legal fees incurred by Apple and Shyamalan. The case was revived in 2022 after it was determined that the judge threw it out too quickly and the fee was struck down. Apple and Shyamalan convinced a jury in 2025 that the makers of Servant did not have access to Gregorini’s film before making their show. Gregorini appealed, and on Thursday, October 22, a U.S. appeals court upheld the jury’s verdict, ending the 6-year battle.

Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.

Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.

• He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
• Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
• The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
• You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.

Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.

• But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
• Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
• Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
• You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.

Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.

• You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
• The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
• Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
• Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.

Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.

• The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
• You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
• That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
• It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.

Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.

• You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
• Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
• Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
• Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.

Is ‘Servant’ Like ‘The Truth About Emmanuel’?

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The movie and film have different characters and tones, with Servant focusing on a couple who lose their baby, and the mother copes by treating a doll like her child. The couple hires a nanny who plays the part, but later on, the doll transforms into an actual baby, deepening the mystery. The Truth About Emanuel also follows the same beats, but the mother lives alone, the nanny is a neighbor, and the doll doesn’t transform. The conflict comes from the nanny’s stepmother, who grows suspicious and threatens to expose the deluded acts. The film premiered six years before the show, and Gregorini’s team couldn’t prove that Servant‘s team had access to it because of its limited success as an independent production, or that they came across the script during the development cycle.

All four seasons of Servant are available to stream on Apple TV, while The Truth About Emmanuel is available for purchase on iTunes.