Taylor Sheridan accused of stealing ‘Yellowstone’ from 2016 pitch in copyright lawsuit

Taylor Sheridan has been accused of stealing Yellowstone from a pitch surfacing a decade ago as part of a copyright suit.

The drama series originally ran between 2018 and 2024, and focuses on the Dutton family and their ranch in Montana, notably conflicts around land.

Sheridan created the Paramount show alongside John Linson, though Sheridan has been sued alongside the studio, 101 Studios and Elevate Entertainment by writer Lauren J.

Salkin.

The suit claims that she pitched her own show Sovereign Nation to Sheridan’s company Elevate in 2016, though received the response: “Taylor thanks you very much for your interest.

Unfortunately, he’s unavailable for TV projects” (via Variety ).

According to the suit, Paramount then greenlit Yellowstone “within months” of the pitch, the documents adding: “Sheridan, however, was not ‘unavailable for TV projects’.

Instead, he and others used Salkin’s copyrighted works to develop Yellowstone .” Among the “specific expressive choices” that were allegedly lifted from Salkin’s pitch were “a tribal casino functioning as the institutional center of political and development power” and “a signature confrontation staged in the tribal chairman’s casino office over expansion beyond reservation boundaries”.

Claimed similarities also include “the use of trust land, the absence of zoning restrictions, and a 99-year lease structure as the concrete mechanism for that expansion” as well as “recurring master-plan imagery deployed to dramatize the struggle for territorial control”.

There are also claims that Salkin put forward Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham for her show, who ended up being cast in Yellowstone in “materially parallel structural roles” to the ones pitched.

“When the works are objectively compared, the same coordinated design repeatedly appears: casino-centered institutions organize political power; the same unusual land-development mechanisms propel the conflict; parallel scenes perform the same dramatic functions; and the same actors appear in materially parallel roles,” the suit adds.

“These are not merely convergences of a shared genre.

Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.” Since concluding, Yellowstone has produced several spin-offs, including 1883, 1923, Marshals and Dutton Ranch .

Last month, Dutton Ranch star Ed Harris revealed he called his agents to try to get him “the fuck out of here” over feeling “feeling underused and inconsequential” in his role.