Cadillac Formula 1 team’s Super Bowl commercial provokes $1.5 million lawsuit

“The Rock” director Michael Bay is suing the Cadillac Formula 1 team, accusing them of using his ideas for their Super Bowl spot without payment.

The 30-second ad shows the various parts of the upcoming Cadillac F1 car coming together amid a desert landscape, with President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech on going to the moon playing in the background, before the car completes itself and zooms off with audio saying that they “have liftoff.”

In his suit, Mr. Bay claims that he had initially been working on the spot in concert with a third-party ad agency and had shown Cadillac F1 team owner Dan Towriss ideas, including a desert scene from 1998’s “Armageddon” and a scene from 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” featuring Kennedy’s 1962 speech, according to Rolling Stone.

Mr. Bay also claimed that partway through the project, which had a tight deadline, Mr. Towriss decided to change gears and hire someone else to finish the spot.

Mr. Bay’s lawyers also said in the $1.5 million lawsuit that Mr. Bay was hired on a single-bid basis to “conceptualize, produce, and direct the commercial,” according to The Athletic.

Mr. Towriss told The Associated Press that “it became clear he couldn’t meet our timeline, and there ultimately wasn’t a path forward” and that “It’s unclear why he’s bringing this claim since the concept and creative were already developed and we were only exploring him as a director.”

He added that he expects the suit will be resolved “appropriately.”

The use of the Kennedy speech was not spurred by Mr. Bay but by the themes the team wanted to convey, Cadillac F1 contends.

“We wanted the car to be the star of the show, and I think with the JFK piece that was a very unifying moment, and it captured a lot of the emotions that went into this team, of this kind of unbridled determination to win and to compete,” Mr. Towriss told Reuters.