NSYNC Choreographer Sues Sony Over Fortnite Emote, Deadpool Film Usage

Millions of Fortnite players dropped V-Bucks on the "Bye Bye Bye" emote. Deadpool's opening sequence racked up 25 million YouTube views. What neither the players nor the viewers knew was that the man who invented that routine in 1999 had never authorized any of it.

Darrin Henson, who created the "Bye Bye Bye" choreography for NSYNC's first live performance of the song, filed a federal lawsuit on March 27 against Sony Music Holdings, alleging the label licensed his work to third parties without his permission. The complaint names Deadpool & Wolverine and Fortnite's emote derived from that sequence as specific unauthorized uses, and seeks a declaratory judgment establishing Henson's sole ownership along with "a complete transfer of all monies earned by SME and its licensees."

Henson's ownership claim rests on a legally significant distinction: he created the choreography independently in 1999 and says he never signed a work-for-hire agreement that would have transferred those rights to Sony or NSYNC. That matters enormously in copyright law, separating a contractor who retains creative ownership from an employee whose output belongs to the employer. Henson has since registered the choreography with the U.S. Copyright Office under registration number PA2554184, and his commercial track record with the material is substantial. He won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Choreography in 2000 for the routine and later built his "Darrin's Dance Grooves" instructional video series around it, moving over three million copies.

Epic Games is not named as a defendant, meaning the suit targets Sony as the licensor rather than the platform that sold the emote. That framing distinguishes this case from the wave of 2018 lawsuits that hit Epic directly, filed by Alfonso Ribeiro over the Carlton dance, 2Milly over the Milly Rock, and BlocBoy JB over the Shoot. Those cases were ultimately withdrawn following a 2019 Supreme Court ruling on copyright registration requirements. More recently, choreographer Kyle Hanagami sued Epic over the "It's Complicated" emote, citing his registered copyright for a routine used in a Britney Spears collaboration.

Henson's suit takes aim further up the chain, challenging whether Sony had valid licensing authority in the first place. If a court rules it did not, every downstream deal built on that license collapses with it, including the Fortnite emote.

For players, the practical fallout is familiar territory. Epic has a documented history of quietly vaulting emotes entangled in active litigation, and anyone who purchased the "Bye Bye Bye" emote could find it shelved for the duration of the case with no refund mechanism in sight. For Epic's content pipeline more broadly, a ruling in Henson's favor would force publishers to audit the entire choreographic licensing chain before converting a pop-culture routine into a purchasable in-game item, adding real friction to an emote economy that Fortnite has spent years perfecting.

The case also surfaces a problem that predates the current legal framework: what happens when a choreographic work created before streaming, before Fortnite, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe reached its current cross-media scale, gets repurposed across decades of licensing without the person who built it seeing a cent.