Side by side of the drama poster and the artist’s work
Oh my, talk about starting off on the wrong foot. Just a week following the announcement that the live action adaptation of Priest’s popular Sha Po Lang 杀破狼 novel is in the works, the drama is already in the hot seat for allegedly copying its poster from another artist’s work without permission.
After the poster accompanying the drama’s big announcement was revealed last week, a comparison of the creative similarities found between the poster and the original work was made by the artist which even received a “Like” from the novel’s author Priest. Well this week, the artist once again reiterated her copyright protection claims and insisted that the drama refrain from replicating her work any further. According to her, lawsuits were quite time consuming and risky and as she is just an ordinary person, she doesn’t want to delve into the matter anymore.
Zoomed out version of the artist’s original work
Meanwhile, responding to the allegations of plagiarism, Sha Po Lang’s production team has released a statement pointing out that the resulting concepts from the artist and the poster company were vastly different. However with things still up in the air between the artist and the Sha Po Lang team, they’ve decided to pull the controversial posters for the meantime at least until an agreement or a decision whether to continue using it or not can be reached.
As a side note, the drama’s production team also took the opportunity to hit two birds with one stone by apologising to the fans of the original book in the press statement. It seems quite a few fans of Priest were unhappy the author wasn’t mentioned in the project’s introductory post so they’re also addressing the concern in the statement.
