The family of the Israeli writer, whose article inspired the 1986 Tom Cruise film Top Gun, is suing Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement on its sequel.
They claim that the studio had no rights to Ehud Yonay’s 1983 story Top Guns when it released the sequel Top Gun: Maverick last month.
The film earned $548 million (£438 million) worldwide in the first 10 days of its release.
Paramount says the allegation is “baseless” and vowed to challenge it.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise reprises his role as US Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell from the original 1986 film.
It had the fourth-biggest opening weekend of any Covid-era film, behind best-selling Spider-Man: No Way Home, second-place Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and then The Batman.
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The lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles federal court by Shosh and Yuval Yonay, Ehud’s widow and son, alleges that Paramount failed to recover the rights to Ehud’s magazine article after it was terminated under US copyright law.
They are seeking an unspecified amount of damages from the film studio, including profits from Top Gun: Maverick.
According to the lawsuit, Paramount’s Top Gun franchise would not have existed without Ehud’s “literary efforts and compelling prose and narrative.”
The lawsuit says the Yonays notified Paramount in 2018 that their rights to Ehud’s article would end two years later.
It added that the studio lost copyright on the play in January 2020.
“As much as Paramount wants to pretend otherwise, they made a sequel to Top Gun after losing their copyrights,” attorney Marc Toberoff, representing the Yonays, told the BBC.
Paramount said in a statement, “These allegations are without foundation and we will vigorously defend ourselves.”
Mitra Ahouraian, a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney, told the BBC that Paramount’s plans to produce Top Gun: Maverick in 2018 and release it in 2019 have been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Timing will be very important in this case as the notice was sent out… with an effective date of 2020,” Ms Ahouraian explained.
In the sequel, Maverick returns to Top Gun Flight Academy as an instructor responsible for training a new generation of pilots.
It gave Hollywood superstar Cruise his first $100 million opening weekend at the box office. Its biggest opening weekend to date came in 2005 with War of the Worlds, which grossed $64 million (£51 million).
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