Taylor Sheridan has been accused of stealing the idea for Yellowstone from a writer’s 2016 pitch, according to a new copyright infringement lawsuit.
In the complaint, obtained by The Independent, Lauren J. Salkin alleges that her rejected pitch bore a number of striking similarities to Sheridan’s hit neo-Western drama.
101 Studios, Paramount Global and NBCUniversal are also named as defendants in the suit.
The Independent has contacted representatives for Sheridan and those companies for comment.
In the complaint, Salkin’s lawyers claim she spent more than a decade developing a TV series named Sovereign Nation, which centered on “tribal governance, casino-driven economic power, and a modern war over land and development.”
Salkin claims she submitted Sovereign Nation to Taylor Sheridan’s representatives in late 2016 and received a rejection in February 2017. “Taylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he’s unavailable for TV projects,” read the response from his representatives, according to the suit.
Months later, Yellowstone was greenlit by Paramount and its first episode aired on June 20, 2018.
Yellowstone starred Kevin Costner as ranch patriarch John Dutton and followed his family’s fight to protect their sprawling Montana ranch from developers, Native American tribes and rival interests seeking to seize control of their land.
Yellowstone ran for five wildly successful seasons from 2018 to 2024, shattering cable viewing records and spawning an expansive TV franchise.
Salkin’s lawyers claim the show “included specific expressive choices already embodied” in Sovereign Nation.
They allegedly included: “A tribal casino functioning as the institutional center of political and development power; a signature confrontation staged in the tribal chairman’s casino office over expansion beyond reservation boundaries; the use of trust land, the absence of zoning restrictions, and a 99-year lease structure as the concrete mechanism for that expansion; and recurring master-plan imagery deployed to dramatize the struggle for territorial control.”
Furthermore, Salkin’s lawyers also claim that she suggested actors Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham in her pitch deck.
Both were later cast in Yellowstone and played “materially parallel structural roles,” they allege: “Birmingham as the tribal political leader whose authority and development strategy run through the casino, and Huston as the outside development power broker who supplies the political or commercial path for that expansion.”
Sheridan had previously cast Birmingham in his 2017 film Wind River, however.
The suit goes on to claim that a senior, unnamed HBO TV executive who had reviewed materials for Sovereign Nation later told her he recognized similarities in Yellowstone and rejected Sheridan’s show for that reason.
“When the works are objectively compared, the same coordinated design repeatedly appears: casino-centered institutions organize political power; the same unusual land-development mechanisms propel the conflict; parallel scenes perform the same dramatic functions; and the same actors appear in materially parallel roles,” the complaint says.
“These are not merely convergences of a shared genre. Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.”
Salkin is seeking damages and profits tied to alleged copyright infringement and injunctive relief preventing future infringement.
“This is a classic David-versus-Goliath situation,” Salkin’s attorney Paul B. Lackey told The Hollywood Reporter.
“She spent years putting together the specific and multi-layered framework for a story that has become the biggest streaming success of all time. She has watched the vast commercial success of this story that was stolen from her and decided that enough was enough. We will do everything in our power to get her justice.”
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