A production company for Blade Runner 2049 has officially filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Warner Bros Discovery, and Elon Musk over the recent robotaxi event held at a Warner Bros studio lot.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court and states Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company misappropriated the movie's brand with promotional material used at the company's recent robotaxi event. That company is Alcon Entertainment, and according to reports, it specifically denied a request to use any material from the film at the recent Tesla event. However, according to the lawsuit, marketing material that was used affiliated the robotaxis with Blade Runner 2049.
The lawsuit calls out a specific image of a male figure wearing a trenchcoat as he overlooks what appears to be a ruined city cloaked in an orange hue. The lawsuit states, "the image was clearly intended to read visually" as a natural steel from Blade Runner 2049, specifically the scene where Ryan Gosling's character is overlooking a ruined Las Vegas. Alcon Entertainment claims Tesla took the original image from Blade Runner 2049, fed it into an AI image generator, and requested the sophisticated software to create a similar image to avoid copyright infringement.
"Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk's massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account," states the complaint. "Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk."
The complaint states that Musksk wanted to associate the event with Blade Runner 2049, which was distributed by Warner Bros Discovery when it was released. More specifically, Musk wanted to use a still image from the movie, which spurred communication between Alcon Entertainment, Tesla, and Warner Bros for rights to be cleared. However, the producers of the movie denied the request, which the lawsuit claims prompted the creation of the alleged AI-generated images.
"All of the Defendants participated in its creation, and in its display in the presentation at the event, from a WBDI-owned building and studio lot, on WBDI-owned video screens and otherwise using WBDI-owned technology infrastructure, operated by or in conjunction with Tesla employees, all acting in whole or in part subject to the direction and control of Musk," the complaint states