The director and screenwriter behind the Oscar-winning film The Holdovers have been sued by a writer who claims they copied 46 story incidents from his unproduced screenplay, including 24 that allegedly appear in the same order.
Simon Stephenson, whose credits include Pixar's Luca and Paddington 2, filed the copyright lawsuit Wednesday, October 28, 2026, in Los Angeles federal court against director Alexander Payne, screenwriter David Hemingson and several production and distribution companies. He alleges that Payne received his 2013 screenplay Frisco years before developing the 2023 film and ultimately used its story structure without permission.
The complaint claims the filmmakers transformed Frisco, a story about a cynical pediatrician accompanying a teenage patient on a trip to San Francisco, into The Holdovers, which follows a bitter boarding-school teacher and a troubled student spending the Christmas holidays together. Stephenson argues that changing the characters' professions and the setting concealed extensive similarities between the two works.
Among the examples cited is a line from a May 2021 draft of The Holdovers in which teenage character Angus discusses traveling to a medical conference. Stephenson's attorneys argue that the reference makes sense within Frisco, where the central character is a physician, but has no apparent connection to the boarding-school story. The line was later removed, while surrounding dialogue remained, according to the complaint.
Stephenson also identifies an unusual screenplay-formatting error that he claims appears in both scripts. His attorneys contend that the matching detail, combined with the 46 alleged story parallels, supports the accusation that the filmmakers copied his work rather than independently developed a similar narrative.
The lawsuit includes email exchanges that Stephenson says establish Payne's access to Frisco. According to the filing, the director received the screenplay in 2013 and again in 2019 but declined to make the project. Stephenson alleges that Payne later directed The Holdovers using material taken from the earlier work.
The complaint names producer Mark Johnson and Gran Via Productions, along with Honest Scholar Productions, Focus Features, Miramax and related companies involved in producing or distributing the film.
Stephenson also accuses Payne of removing or concealing copyright-management information identifying him as the author of Frisco, alleging that the changes obscured the source of material incorporated into The Holdovers.
The dispute first became public in March 2024, when Stephenson raised plagiarism allegations in correspondence with the Writers Guild of America. He argued that the films shared extensive structural and narrative similarities and submitted comparisons to support his position.
Payne previously rejected the accusations, calling them "the stupidest thing in the world" during an appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2024. The director has attributed the origins of The Holdovers partly to the 1935 French film Merlusse and a boarding-school television pilot written by Hemingson.
Released in 2023, The Holdovers received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Da'Vine Joy Randolph won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the film.
Stephenson is seeking damages, attorney's fees, and an injunction against further alleged copyright infringement. His lawsuit places the competing accounts of the film's development before a federal court, where he will seek to establish that the similarities resulted from unauthorized copying.
