\n\tAt one point in Power Ballad<\/em>, the latest music-focused film from director John Carney<\/strong>, a record executive tells a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas<\/a>, not to worry about plagiarism accusations from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd<\/strong>. After all, he says, \u201cWhere there\u2019s a hit, there\u2019s a writ.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n \t\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n\tWhile Carney\u2019s movie is aimed at a wide audience, that line is going to resonate with a very specific subset of them: music lawyers. It\u2019s a legendary axiom of the trade going back decades \u2014 the idea being that if you get popular enough in the music business, somebody is eventually going to sue you for a cut.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAnything to get lawyers laughing at the cinema,\u201d Carney jokes while speaking with Billboard<\/em> about Power Ballad<\/em>, which hits theaters nationwide this Friday (June 5).<\/p>\n \n\tLike all his films, Power Ballad<\/em> mines human drama from the world of music. The critically-adored Once<\/em> (2007) showed the power of music to heal and connect people; his Sing Street <\/em>(2016) used it to anchor a coming-of-age story. This time, Carney\u2019s found his story in a type of conflict that the music industry has come to know all too well in recent years.<\/p>\n \n\tRick Power (Rudd) is a middle-aged wedding singer who sees his heartfelt song stolen by Danny Wilson (Jonas), an ex-boy bander trying to become a solo star. As it climbs the charts, Rick becomes obsessed with proving the track was his original creation, but nobody believes him \u2014 not his band, not his lawyers, maybe not even his wife. Danny flatly denies it, and there\u2019s no evidence to prove him wrong.<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s a story that\u2019s played out many times in the real world, where music stars are regularly hit with copyright lawsuits and legal threats over sound-alike songs. Some are valid, filed by artists who have genuinely had their material copied by a bigger name; many others are not, claiming plagiarism in little more than similar vibes or basic chords.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n\t\u201cI know a lot of musicians and songwriters, and I think every one of them past a certain level success or fortune or fame gets one or two of these claims, so it was in my world for a long time,\u201d Carney says about the inspiration for the plot. \u201cThen it started to show up in the newspapers more and more.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBack in 2022, Dua Lipa<\/a> was accused of stealing<\/a> her mega-hit \u201cLevitating\u201d from a little-known Florida reggae group in a case that was later dropped<\/a>. Later that year, Ed Sheeran<\/a> won a high-profile trial<\/a> over claims that his chart-topping \u201cShape of You\u201d copied a song called \u201cOh Why\u201d by a smaller artist named Sami Chokri<\/strong>. Then in 2023, Post Malone<\/a> settled with a studio musician<\/a> who claimed he\u2019d helped create the smash \u201cCircles\u201d during an all-night jam session and then been denied credit. There have been countless more examples both before and since.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Power Ballad<\/em> features a few lawyers and some spirited threats over the phone, it mostly avoids an outright legal battle \u2014 a move Carney tells Billboard<\/em> made sense for the story he was trying to tell. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to do a courtroom drama,\u201d he says. \u201cThat might be very interesting [but] I\u2019m not the guy to direct that. We decided to write a hopefully more kind of a timeless story: how an artist feels when they feel they\u2019ve been ripped off.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn this case that ripped-off artist is Rudd\u2019s Rick, an American living in Ireland who once had stadium-sized ambitions as a young man but has now settled for playing weddings and living a happy life with his wife and teenage daughter. The alleged thief is Jonas\u2019 Danny, an ex-boy band member who apparently missed his Justin Timberlake<\/a> or Harry Styles<\/a> moment and is now at risk of getting dropped by his label if he can\u2019t find a solo hit quick.<\/p>\n \n\tAfter a chance encounter at a wedding, Rick and Danny spend a hazy night together drinking, smoking and jamming on each other\u2019s songs, including Rick\u2019s ballad \u201cHow to Write a Song (Without You).\u201d Everyone leaves the night happy \u2014 until six months later, when Rick hears the song blaring over loudspeakers at a mall, turned into a pop song that\u2019s revitalized Danny\u2019s career.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n\tAs the track tops the charts and Rick fixates on proving he wrote it, his life begins to fall apart. But the singer, who once dreamed of pop stardom for himself, simply cannot bring himself to give up the fight. Those big emotions are what power Carney\u2019s movie, and they, too, are rooted in real-life fights \u2014 where accusers often spend years of their lives and rack up huge legal bills<\/a> on doomed pursuits of recognition.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cResearching the project, it made me realize that you could, and I\u2019m sure plenty of people have, kind of die on the altar of getting remuneration and credit for their thing. But it\u2019s not worth it,\u201d Carney says. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to lose too much of your present life on earth fighting for something for too long.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the real world, of course, many of those accusers are simply wrong. Whether they\u2019ve cynically made their claims to win a payout or genuinely believe their song was copied, the majority of song-theft cases end in defeat. Judges often rule there\u2019s no evidence a pop star ever even heard the allegedly-copied song, as one did in 2024<\/a> in a case against Megan Thee Stallion<\/a>. In other cases, like one against Katy Perry<\/a>, courts say the songs share only basic \u201cbuilding blocks\u201d<\/a> like chords that everyone is free to use.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat makes Power Ballad<\/em> so fun is that the audience knows from the outset that Rick is actually<\/em> right<\/em>. Because of how such cases typically play out, the whole world is predisposed to dismiss him \u2014 to think he\u2019s just another kook who came out of the woodwork with a wild conspiracy theory about a pop song. But like many of the people who bring those kinds of allegations, Rick is desperate to understand why Danny didn\u2019t give him credit, and to be believed.<\/p>\n \n\tFor Carney, himself a longtime musician who has been putting songs on screen for decades, that\u2019s an \u201cendlessly interesting\u201d topic that was worth exploring. \u201cI think I\u2019ve been on both sides of the thing,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve never been in a courtroom, but I\u2019ve been emotionally invested with various people \u2014 in who did what and who deserves what.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At one point in Power Ballad, the latest music-focused film from director John Carney, a record executive tells a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas, not to worry about plagiarism accusations from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd. After all, he says, \u201cWhere there\u2019s a hit, there\u2019s a writ.\u201d Related While Carney\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2444854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[378757,309165,33075,40695,21912,361918],"class_list":["post-2444853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-film-and-tv","tag-genre-pop","tag-lawsuits","tag-legal","tag-movies","tag-movies-and-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Paul-Rudd-Nick-Jonas-Movie-Power-Ballad-Evokes-Real.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2444855,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444853\/revisions\/2444855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2444854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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