Director of Alison Brie’s ‘Together’ denies “deeply unsettling” plagiarism claims

The director of Together, the body horror movie at the centre of a lawsuit, has denied what he calls the “upsetting” claims surrounding the project.

The movie stars real-life spouses Alison Brie and Dave Franco as a couple who move to the countryside but find themselves encountering a mysterious force that horrifically fuses their bodies together.

The film was a hit at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and sold for $17Million to studio NEON, making one of the highest selling films in Sundance history. Last month, however, the makers of the 2023 film Better Half sued the stars as well as agency WME, claiming the film was a “blatant rip-off” of their movie due to its use of the concept of a couple fused together, as well as certain plot elements.

The plaintiffs allege that Franco and Brie were pitched Better Half in 2020, but they and their WME agents turned it down. Neon and WME said in a statement on Wednesday (June 18), reported by Variety, that the lawsuit is unfounded and concerned with “drumming up fifteen minutes of fame for a failed project”.

The defendants’ lawyer, Nicolas Jampol, has argued that the two projects are “not remotely similar.” In a letter to the plaintiffs’ representatives, he wrote that Together was independently created, and that the screenplay for the film was first registered in 2019 — before Better Half was pitched to them.

Also on Wednesday, the writer director of the film, Michael Shanks, has released a statement detailing his distress at the case (via Variety). “To have this called into question is not only deeply upsetting but entirely untrue,” he said. “To now be accused of stealing this story — one so deeply based on my own lived experience, one I’ve developed over the course of several years — is devastating and has taken a heavy toll”.

He continued: “I wish I didn’t have to clarify this, but I completed the first draft in 2019 and registered it to the Writer’s Guild of America that same year,” he said. “In October 2020, I received development funding from Screen Australia to further the project. In 2022, my agent at WME introduced me to Dave Franco”.

“From our very first meeting, we bonded over our love of horror, and I pitched him Together — a script I had been trying to get into production for years, with no luck. Soon after, he and Alison Brie came onboard to act in and produce the film”.

“The suggestion not only undermines the work but also attempts to erase the emotional and professional journey I’ve taken to bring it to life,” he concluded. “But more importantly: the facts matter. The timeline is documented. The drafts, submissions, and correspondence are all there”.

Together is due for release in the US on July 30.

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