"A Quiet Place" Movie Studio Hit With Big Lawsuit
Class-action filed for violating Americans with Disabilities Act
The law firm of Pettifogger & Barratry, PC, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the movie “A Quiet Place.” According to ConsumerAction, a group that tracks such suits, P&B alleges that Paramount violated Title III of the American with Diabilities Act that “prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the activities of places of public accommodations,” which include movie theaters.
According to P&B Managing Partner, Warren A. Rainmaker, “We have filed this suit on behalf of the one million unsighted persons in the United States and the estimated five million deaf persons, all of whom have been denied, on the basis of their disabilities, full participation as audience members of the Paramount film, ‘A Quiet Place’ and its sequel films.”
The text of the suit states that “Americans with the disabilities enumerated above have been deprived of the ability to understand and fully experience the meaning and content of said films for which they paid admission.”
While the suit does not name the representative plaintiffs who filed the suit, it does include affidavits from a member of each of the two classes.
According to an affidavit filed by a sightless person, when attending a screening of one of the films at a local theater, “For most of the ninety minutes of the film, all I could hear was silence, punctuated occasionally by ominous sounding music or coughing by other audience members. For a few brief intervals, I heard screaming, loud noises, and sounds that I surmise were the sounds of some kind of animals or monsters. Basically, the movie was a total waste for me and the theater management refused to refund my price of admission.”
Similarly, one affidavit filed by a filmgoer who is totally deaf, complained that “I could not discern the scenes that were intended to be silent from those that were not. Occasionally, I was able to feel slight vibrations in my chest cavity that I assume corresponded to loud sounds in the film. The subtitles were only superficial in describing what was going on and many of them were unreadable when contrasted against numerous white backgrounds in the scenes themselves.”
P&B is seeking relief in the form of free passes for everyone in the affected classes to movies that do accommodate those with disabilities, plus $15 million dollars, of which $10,000 each will be distributed to the handful of representative plaintiffs and the remainder to P&B to cover the time and materials it took to file this case.
Responding to accusations by Paramount executives that the suit is “essentially baseless,” Rainmaker replied that the suit had just as much merit as other class-action suits recently settled successfully by P&B, include one on behalf of astrologers, another on behalf of America’s procrastinators, and a massive suit against major media on behalf of “all sentient Americans who have had to listen to non-stop news almost exclusively about Donald Trump since June 2015.”