On Monday it was reported on hollywoodreporter.com that The Walking Dead co-creator, Robert Kirkman, and series producers Gale Anne Hurd, Glen Mazzara (no longer a producer for the show) and David Alpert have filed a suit against AMC with the allegation that they’ve been massively cheated.

“This case arises from a major entertainment conglomerate’s failure to honor its contractual obligations to the creative people — the ‘talent,’ in industry jargon — behind the wildly successful, and hugely profitable, long-running television series The Walking Dead,” opens the complaint filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court. “The defendant AMC Entities exploited their vertically integrated corporate structure to combine both the production and the exhibition of TWD, which allowed AMC to keep the lion’s share of the series’ enormous profits for itself and not share it with the Plaintiffs, as required by their contracts.”

Here’s the full complaint. The claims are breach of contract, tortious interference and unfair or fraudulent business acts under California business code.

Like Darabont’s lawsuit, the plaintiffs are questioning the amount “paid” by AMC Network to AMC’s studio arm for the right to air the show. Because the companies are affiliated with each other, what’s seen on Walking Dead profit participation statements are imputed license fees, meaning a stand-in figure that doesn’t really mean that money has exchanged hands. During the first four seasons of Walking Dead, AMC was imputing a fee of $1.45 million per episode. That’s now up to $2.4 million, but is still less than the non-imputed license fees of Better Call Saul (a Breaking Bad spinoff) and Mad Men, which are produced by non-affiliated Sony and Lionsgate, respectively, and don’t command NFL primetime-type ratings as Walking Dead does.
Source: hollywoodreporter.com (link above)

Read more about this via the hollywoodreporter.com link up above. This is most likely not good news for the show. This comes