‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ Adaptation Sparks Breach of Contract Lawsuit Over Film Rights

Logo text A producer has filed a lawsuit over the film rights to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, alleging she was illegally pushed out of the venture she created to develop the movie. The producer, Marisa Polvino, accuses her former partners of breach of contract and fraud for allegedly diverting the project’s rights and development assets away from her production company. The lawsuit filed on Sunday in California federal court names Sound of Freedom executive producer Anthony Robbins, producer Kate Cohen and MarVista Entertainment and parent Fox Entertainment, both of which allegedly helped move the movie away from Polvino’s OLF Productions and continued to develop it without the producer. It seeks a court order restoring Polvino’s rights to the film and unspecified damages, among other things. Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles Frankl’s experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Since its publication in 1946, it’s sold more than 16 million copies in over 50 languages. Polvino and Cohen, who have been developing the movie alongside Robbins for years, bought the book’s film rights in 2016 from Frankl’s estate. The lawsuit claims that development of the movie took a contentious turn after MarVista joined in 2024, when the company entered a financing agreement with OLF Productions. The deal provided for a $300,000 development fund, shared approval rights and profit participation, according to the complaint. Within months of striking that agreement, however, Cohen embezzled funds meant for the movie and diverted other pieces for the project, including development assets and negotiations to renew the underlying movie rights, to a new company, the lawsuit says. She allegedly told representatives for MarVista and Fox that Polvino had agreed to surrender her rights and fees to the movie as compensation for embezzling $500,000 from another company they had co-owned. Polvino alleges that Fox and MarVista turned a blind eye to the dispute and continued to develop the film alongside Cohen and Robbins. According to the complaint, development of the screenplay and writer agreements proceeded under a different company. The underlying rights to the movie are a major focus of the lawsuit. Polvino accuses Robbins of cutting her out of the project by acquiring those rights after they expired in 2024. MarVista and Fox later invoked the development as a basis for stating that OLF Productions was in breach of their deal and that they could freely negotiate with Robbins, according to the complaint. All of Polvino’s former partners on the movie now maintain she has no role in the project, the lawsuit says. Polvino “brings this action to recover the money, rights, opportunities, credit, and value that were stripped away; to protect the copyrighted works and chain of title built through years of development; to restore OLF to active status; and to hold each defendant accountable for their respective role in the scheme to take what was not theirs and profit from it as though she and OLF had never been part of it at all,” writes Jacob Struck, a lawyer for the producer, in the filing.