Johnny Depp's Notorious B.I.G. Film Gets Hit With A $10M Lawsuit

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City Of Lies Has Been Pulled From Its Release Schedule

City of Lies, Johnny Depp‘s film based on the Los Angeles Police Department’s investigation into the murders of The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, is not going as planned.

Distributors of the movie were sued for $10 million by Bank Leumi on Wednesday after they pulled the movie from their release schedule.

Global Road Entertainment planned to distribute City of Lies in theaters on September 7, but backed out of the project this month “because of the current environment surrounding it,” said the company’s CEO in a recent phone conversation cited in the suit, as reported by Variety.

Miramax, which owned the film’s television distribution rights, subsequently pulled out of the project, too. The company wrote in a letter to Bank Leumi–which helped finance the project–that the decision was made in part because of “the highly publicized alleged offscreen conduct of Johnny Depp,” which “significantly devalued” the film.

In May, it was alleged that Depp punched a location manager on the film’s set, shouting, “I’ll give you $100,000 to punch me right now!” Two months later, the crew member ended up suing him for the altercation.

Bank Leumi seeks $5.4 million from Global Road and $4.25 million from Miramax, money that both distributors have already agreed to pay the bank.

It’s unclear whether the film, based on Randall Sullivan’s 2003 book LAbrynth, will ever see the light of the day at this point. Depp plays a character by the name of Russell Poole, the LAPD detective who led the investigation, who also claimed that the then-Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight and another LAPD officer were connected to the murder.