Designer claims his Oldboy poster art was stolen; Spike Lee responds

Last Updated on July 22, 2021

Spike Lee's OLDBOY is out in theaters now (check out The Arrow's take on it HERE), but there is some trouble brewing behind the scenes as a designer is claiming that his poster artwork was 'stolen', with his concepts used without permission to market the remake.

Juan Luis Garcia has taken to his personal website and written an open letter in which he details his experience working on early artwork for OLDBOY. In short, he claims in January of this year he was hired by an ad agency, who was working directly with Spike Lee, to put together artwork for the film, and in the course of over two months the designer says he was "taken advantage of, lead on, lied to, manipulated, and harassed" by the agency but was told Lee really liked what he came up with. Here's what Garcia shared on his site:

The agency told me, “Congratulations, Spike loved a couple of the posters. Yours is going to be the key art.”, and I was thrilled. But when it came time to negotiate the licensing buyout fee the agency made an insultingly low offer. But they said that the important thing wasn’t the money it was the exposure and potential for more work. After thinking about it long and hard I had to decline. I tried to negotiate but they refused. I make the same amount of money in a single day as a photo assistant as what they offered and I had worked on these almost exclusively for two months. Plus there was still more work to be done so I had to refuse.

The agency was furious. They told me that I didn’t want to mess with Spike Lee, that I would never work again, that I was a despicable human, that they wish they never met me, and that they were going to sue my ass to oblivion. For what, I honestly don’t know. We never signed any contracts or work-for-hire agreements and I certainly never agreed to donating or selling any copyright of my work without a licensing fee. 

The worst part of all this is that I never even got paid the peanuts they owed me. I was fine with it as long as they were out of my life. I couldn’t take another condescending phone call because I was “only a designer.” Many sleepless nights forced me to chock it up as a loss and learning experience and try to move on with my life.

The artist pleads with Spike Lee to do the right thing (see what I did there? Ok, ok…I admit it was a bad line, but c'mon!) and see to it that he is renumerated for his work, but Lee took to Twitter to address the controversy in a way that many feel is unacceptable, tweeting:

Seems kind of douchey, huh? Maybe Garcia should borrow Brolin's hammer and exact some OLDBOY-styled justice himself.

Take a look at Garcia's poster design below (on the left) and compare it to the poster utilzed in the marketing of the film (on the right). What do you think? Hopefully this little matter is resolved soon.