The Los Angeles federal jury deliberated for only about two-and-a-half hours before deciding on Monday that the creators of Moana never had access to writer and animator Buck Woodall's outlines and script for Bucky the Surfer Boy.
With that question settled, the jury of six women and two men didn't even have to consider the similarities between Bucky and Disney's 2016 hit animated film about a questing Polynesian princess.
Woodall had shared his work with a distant relative, who worked for a different company on the Disney lot, but the woman testified during the two-week trial that she never showed it to anyone at Disney.
"Obviously we're disappointed," Woodall's lawyer Gustavo Lage said outside court.
"We're going to review our options and think about the best path forward."
In closing arguments earlier on Monday, Woodall's lawyer said that a long chain of circumstantial evidence showed the two works were inseparable.
"There was no Moana without Bucky," Lage said.
Defence lawyer Moez Kaba said that the evidence showed overwhelmingly that Moana was clearly the creation and "crowning achievement" of the 40-year career of John Musker and Ron Clements, the writers and directors behind The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules and The Princess and the Frog.
"They had no idea about Bucky," Kaba said in his closing.
"They had never seen it, never heard of it."
Moana earned nearly $US700 million ($A1.1 billion) at the global box office.
A judge previously ruled that Woodall's 2020 lawsuit came too late for him to claim a piece of those receipts, and that a lawsuit he filed earlier this year over Moana 2 — which earned more than $US1 billion ($A1.6 billion) — must be decided separately.
That suit remains active, though the jury's decision does not bode well for it.
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