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Score one for Bill Nye the Science Guy. This week, Nye notched a major win in his ongoing lawsuit against the Walt Disney Co. when a Los Angeles judge ordered a 10-day trial to begin in May 2020. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the beloved television host claims that Disney’s Buena Vista Television owes $28 million in profits from Bill Nye the Science Guy, which ran from 1993 to 1998, and is seeking punitive damages for its “long and consistent pattern of under-reporting revenue and improperly applying deductions.”
Nye and Disney have been battling over Bill Nye the Science Guy profits since 2017, but on Wednesday, real headway was finally made in the case when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that Nye has grounds to take his claim to court. Although the judge limited the scope of the lawsuit to the past eight years (2011 to present), the order is a major victory for the former Science Guy, who now has the opportunity to present his case to an impartial jury.
In 2017, Nye filed a suit alleging that Disney’s Buena Vista Television, the show’s distributor, shortchanged Bill Nye the Science Guy owners on the show’s profits. According to the Los Angeles Times, the suit claims that under the original 1993 deal with Buena Vista, Nye and the other owners were “entitled to 50% of net profits from the series,” which ran on PBS for five seasons before entering national syndication. The owners allege that Disney withheld millions by “under-reporting revenue and improperly applying deductions” through deceptive accounting practices, and as a result, they are now claiming a total of $28.1 million in damages, with $9.4 million owed personally to Nye.
In a statement to the L.A. Times, Nye’s attorneys praised the court’s order. “It is our hope that this case, which Disney has fought so hard to stall, will finally shine some light upon the improper accounting practices that Disney utilizes to unjustly deprive profit participants, like our clients, of their fair share of revenues from the programming that they work so hard to create,” said the law firm Hamrick & Evans.
