re: SIAP: Duffer Brothers sued for stealing “Stranger Things” idea from short film

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Nature of the beast.

Babylon 5/ DS9

Fables/Once upon a time

Asylum films

Disaster films that come in pairs from two studios.

He's up a creek without a paddle because this will likely fall into same area as Dan Brown being sued for Da Vinci Code.

Everyone works with the same material, in this case government conspiracies and mad science at a well publicized site.

Also being a totally different method of showing the story goes against it.

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Some people are far too immediately dismissive of this sort of thing for whatever philosophical or political reason. None of the examples you give are relevant to the claimed situation here. Except for the Asylum films, they're all easily treated as separate projects from separate studios regarding a very general concept. The idea of a drama in space or an asteroid headed for earth is much more general than the accusation that a proposed project's details were lifted directly from a pitch and used without credit. Claims of plagiarism and intellectual theft are dealt with all the time in Hollywood, frequently to the benefit of the accusers. Hell, the industry actually anticipates this sort of thing and will often just go ahead and settle to avoid a protracted legal battle so everyone can go home happy.

Studios themselves tend to be less litigious because it's just not worth the effort for anything less than a major franchise (like Disney properties, for instance), which explains Asylum films. The few dollars they might lose won't be recouped from cheap knockoffs and they aren't anticipating much of an ongoing ROI for some one-off film. Most writers, on the other hand, not having hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, have a lot more to gain from squeezing money out of a major corporation.

Let Asylum make a series of movies about Duke Skyclimber in a "Star Force" trilogy and see what happens.