Six Years After Suing Over Servant, a Filmmaker Loses Her Final Appeal Against Apple
Francesca Gregorini alleged M. Night Shyamalan copied her 2013 indie film. A jury said his team never saw it. An appeals court just agreed.
A U.S. appeals court upheld a jury verdict for Apple and M. Night Shyamalan on October 22, 2026, closing a six-year copyright lawsuit over the Apple TV thriller Servant. The ruling ends Francesca Gregorini's claim that the show lifted its core premise from her 2013 indie film The Truth About Emanuel.
Both films center on a grieving mother who cares for a lifelike reborn doll and a nanny who grows attached to the substitute baby. Gregorini alleged that Servant copied not just that premise but also the tone, characters, and visual styling of her film. Apple and Shyamalan denied it.
How the Case Turned on Access
Under U.S. copyright law, a plaintiff has to show two things: that the defendant had access to the protected work, and that the two works are substantially similar. The case never reached the similarity question in a meaningful way. Collider reported that the jury found Shyamalan's team could not have been proven to have accessed Gregorini's film before developing Servant, given its limited circulation as an independent production.
Gregorini's film had a narrow distribution run. The argument that a major filmmaker would have encountered it before developing a major streaming series did not hold up to the jury's scrutiny. Without access, the similarity claim was legally hollow.
The Procedural History
The lawsuit began roughly a year after Servant premiered on Apple TV in November 2019. A judge dismissed the case in 2020. Gregorini appealed, and in 2022 a higher court found the original dismissal was too hasty: the case deserved a full hearing. Apple and Shyamalan then won at the jury level in 2025. Gregorini appealed again. The October 22, 2026 ruling by the U.S. appeals court upheld that jury verdict and ended the litigation.
At an earlier stage the judge imposed a $160,000 legal fee sanction against Gregorini. That sanction was later struck down, according to Collider's reporting.
The Commentary
The case is a clean example of what makes film copyright litigation so hard for plaintiffs. Shared premises are not protected by copyright: the idea of a grieving parent and a substitute baby is not owned by anyone. What is protected is the specific expression, and proving that one creator took that expression from another requires proving they ever encountered the other's work.
When an independent filmmaker's film and a major streaming series share a premise, it is genuinely possible that two creative teams arrived at similar ideas independently. Grief rituals around infant loss, including reborn dolls, are a documented social phenomenon that multiple writers could find and build from without any contact with each other's work.
What the case illustrates for independent filmmakers is the gap between "this looks similar" and "this was copied from me." Similarity without access is coincidence under the law, and proving access when your film circulated quietly through a limited distribution run is structurally very difficult against a defendant with resources and records.
Servant ran for four seasons on Apple TV before ending in 2023. The appeals court ruling closes any further legal challenge to the show.
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site. We have no affiliation with Apple, M. Night Shyamalan, or any parties in this case.
