Tarantino to Proceed with “Pulp Fiction” NFTs Despite Miramax Suit

Quentin Tarantino has announced that he will proceed with the sale of a series of “Pulp Fiction” NFTs this month. Miramax has responded by clarifying that its lawsuit is not over, nor has Tarantino won any concessions.

Auction Will Begin In Mid-January

SCRT Labs and Secret Network, which will power the NFT auction, announced the news in a Jan. 5 press release.

Each NFT features a scene from Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” screenplay along with audio commentary from the director. Unlike many NFTs, the content of these tokens can only be decrypted by the buyer, and will only be made public if the buyer chooses to share the content.

The auction is set to take place between Jan. 17 and Jan. 31, with NFTs for seven scenes being sold during those dates.

When the NFT series was first announced in November, the project was hit by a lawsuit from “Pulp Fiction” distributor Miramax. The film company claimed that the NFTs constituted intellectual property violations and a breach of contract on Tarantino’s part.

Secret Network did not directly address progress on that lawsuit in its press release, but asserted that Tarantino owns the “exclusive rights to publish his ‘Pulp Fiction’ screenplay.”

It added that the tokenized version of the screenplay on auction is Tarantino’s “original, handwritten copy,” which the director has kept private in the decades following the film’s 1994 release.

Lawsuit Is Not Over Yet

Despite the decision to go forward with the auction, it appears that the lawsuit with Miramax is far from over.

Miramax’s representatives told various sites today that Tarantino’s legal team has not won the lawsuit and that legal action is still pending. Bart Williams, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP and attorney for Miramax in their lawsuit against Tarantino, released the following statement earlier today:

“Any claim that Tarantino has ‘defeated’ this lawsuit is verifiably false as Miramax’s claims and the litigation remains pending. There’s been no attempt to dismiss any of Miramax’s claims by Tarantino’s team, nor have they filed any counter claims or motions against Miramax, and since Miramax filed its lawsuit, the promotional website and Twitter account for the proposed sale have scaled back the unauthorized use of imagery from Miramax films (including Pulp Fiction). For anyone to presume Tarantino victorious at this time by merely filing his response to the complaint is inaccurate, misleading and premature to say the least.“

The conflict between Tarantino and Miramax represents an important moment for the non-fungible token industry, as NFTs are often used to manage rights and ownership of creative works. Though past conflicts around IP theft have occurred, the mainstream nature of the “Pulp Fiction” conflict could have a wider impact.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.