Last year on TG we discussed an upcoming iOS game app that tied in to an upcoming movie: Danny Trejo’s Vengeance.
The game pitted together two unlikely sparring partners, namely action star Trejo and Apple founder Steve Woznaik. Trejo is handling a machete of course, Wozniak has a gun, and the subtitle of the game is: Woz with a Cause.
As amusing as this game seems, it’s now apparently the subject of a lawsuit. As Deadline reports, Robert Rodriguez, the director of Machete, Spy Kids and El ariachi, has been sued by a producer for $11 million for alleged “threats and intimidation” to hurt Danny Trejo’s Vengeance.
The suit was filed by ITN Flix and it alleges that “Rodriquez feared that the promotion of another film starring Danny Trejo would diminish the Machete Kills brand and would threaten box office numbers and thus set in motion a plan to diminish ITN’s reputation and stifle the success of the film and the App game.”
Of course, in Hollywood you do everything through agents, managers and lawyers, and ITN claimed it was “bullied, threatened and intimidated” by Trejo’s agent, who also allegedly told Wozniak that the CEO of ITN was “a con man.” Then the Woz backed out of the app, which cost ITN about $5 million a month, or so the suit claims.
Like a lot of lawsuits, this all sounds pretty silly to us, and a silly little app like Vengeance isn’t going to hurt Rodriguez’s movies, which are also pretty ridiculous themselves.
Trejo’s also starred in enough crap action movies that one more on the pile won’t hurt any others either. And the app looks like harmless fun, so what the hell? They should make another game app with the film execs and Trejo’s agent battling it out, and we’ll see who is more macho.
