There has been an ongoing battle between the production company that is re-launching the online soaps All My Children and One Life to Live with ABC. News reports today stated that Prospect Park is suing ABC for 25 million dollars over the licensing agreement they had with ABC regarding the actors and character names from All My Children and One Life to Live. The main issues were heated in previous months regarding the status of the three OLTL characters General Hospital “borrowed” from Prospect Park. After the announcement last week that Kristen Alderson (ex-Starr Manning), Michael Easton (ex-John McBain/Caleb Morley/Stephen Clay), and Roger Howarth (ex-Todd Manning) would be returning to GH May 10th 2013, most likely as new characters, the situation went up in flames. Prospect Park claims that the agreement stated that ABC could borrow seven OLTL characters for General Hospital to keep them employed and appear sparingly on GH.
Prospect Park has filed a breach of contract lawsuit against ABC, complaining that they have broken the licensing agreement and have been trying to sabotage the production process for the AMC and OLTL online series. Prospect Park claims that “in the ultimate act of bad faith, ABC inexplicably killed off two OLTL characters on loan to GH by having their car forced off a cliff. ABC effectively killed off another major OLTL character, who was not licensed to ABC, revealing that this long standing OLTL character is in fact another character (alter ego) on GH.”
Prospect Park accuses an ABC executive of openly wishing All My Children and One Life to Live’s relaunch to fail.
The process of the lawsuit and Prospect Park’s request to go to trial with have no baring on the launch date for these two online soaps. They remain to launch next week, April 29th, 2013.
For more information on this issue, please visit www.deadline.com