The French filmmaker Luc Besson has been ordered to pay Hollywood’s self-styled “master of horror”, John Carpenter, nearly €450,000 (£379,000) for plagiarising his classic 1981 movie Escape from New York, according to a report published online on Friday.
Carpenter, who is best known for his horror films Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, had demanded $2.4m.
Kurt Russell plays a government agent-turned-convict who goes in to rescue the US president after his plane crashes there.
An appeals court in Paris ruled that Lockout had “massively borrowed key elements” of the movie, according to an online report by BFMTV (French).