LOS ANGELES – The wife of a crew worker who died on the set of the upcoming Spider-Man movie has sued Columbia Pictures.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed Wednesday in Superior Court seeks unspecified damages. A call to Columbia Pictures, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, wasn't immediately returned early Thursday.
Tim Holcombe, 45, of Monrovia died March 6 while welding sets for the film when a forklift — which had been converted to a crane — toppled onto a construction basket in which he was riding, investigators said. Another worker in the basket was not seriously injured.
Equipment maker Ingersoll-Rand also is named in the lawsuit. Representatives from that company couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.
Columbia Pictures was fined nearly $59,000 in August for workplace violations stemming from Holcombe's death.
The lawsuit is the second recent setback for the film. Studio executives pulled a Spider-Man trailer from theaters and the Internet after terrorist attacks last week in New York and Washington. The trailer contained a scene in which a helicopter carrying fleeing robbers gets trapped in a giant spider web strung between the World Trade Center towers, which collapsed after a pair of hijacked planes slammed into them.
Spider-Man, based on the Marvel Comics hero, is scheduled to open in May and will star Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe and Kirsten Dunst.
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