Marvel Planning Major Punishments For People They Find Leaking Information
Marvel has subpoenaed Reddit and Google for information on the person(s) who leaked the Ant-Man and the Wasp script and will presumably take legal action against them.
Marvel is potentially taking legal action against the person or people who leaked information from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania on the r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers subreddit. Currently, the studio has subpoenaed the information of the leaker from Reddit and Google. The Ant-Man and the Wasp sequel is one of many MCU movies that have had plot details leaked before the film hit theaters, including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has requested that Reddit give up the information of the Reddit poster, including “all identifying information,” so the movie studio can seek legal action against the leaker. Marvel has also requested that Google give up information about the user as well since the documents spoiled on Reddit were hosted on Google Drive. A federal judge in California issued the subpoenas under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In mid-January, moderators on the Reddit subgroup r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers posted a subtitle file that corroborated the leak. Allegedly, the initial script leak was in a different language, and the moderators translated it to English before posting. The subtitle file appeared two months after unconfirmed plot details had been leaked on the same subreddit.
The popular r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers subreddit was initially changed to private after Marvel had subpoenaed the information, but now the channel has been shut down.
In response to the subpoena asking Reddit to reveal its user’s private information, the social news aggregator released a statement announcing that the website is dedicated to protecting its user’s personal information and has processes in place to handle legal requests like Marvel’s. Reddit said that its processes determine when to meet subpoena requests with rejection if appropriate but did not clarify if this was an occasion when it would do so. Google has yet to make any public statements in response to the subpoenas.
In the 15 years that Marvel has built up the MCU, the studio has been no stranger to leaks. While some of the studio’s own actors are often to blame due to excitedly slipping up during interviews, like Tom Holland is famously known to do, leaks from below-the-line personnel (like where the script leak on Reddit likely came from) have become more common in recent years.
The uptrend of more MCU leaks happening lately is likely caused by a combination of more VFX editors being hired on to handle complicated special effects editing and the after-effects of COVID-19 creating a new standard of people working from home, where they are unsupervised, and therefore, the temptation to steal content is more appealing.
Marvel has not announced what it will do if it gets the identifying information for the Ant-Man leak. They will most likely pursue legal action, which means that the studio will have to prove that the leaker intentionally infringed the copyright and looked to make money off of the infringement or published the script knowing that the content creator meant to distribute the project commercially in the near future. Obviously, the second wouldn’t be hard to prove, as Marvel is one of the biggest commercial movie distributors in the world.
