by Nathaniel R
As you may have heard, Scarlett Johansson has sued Disney for breach of contract. She may have lost up to $50 million in bonuses on Black Widow. The very simplest way to explain it is that expensive movie stars (and some key directors) tend to earn "points" based on box office performance. A-listers like Johansson can reap hefty sums each time a movie passes certain agreed-upon thresholds. Disney, eager to beef up their Disney+ service, didn't regenotiate with her about her Black Widow contract before opting to place it on their streaming service for $30, thereby undermining its traditional box office and cutting Scarlett out of the significant $ of Disney+ purchases...
This is the same legally icky area Warner Bros dove right into when they suddenly announced that their movies would stream on HBOMax the same day they hit theaters; Filmmakers were not happy about their contracts not being regenotiated and, as Variety reminds us, Warner Bros paid out many of the biggest stars (presumably to avoid just this kind of lawsuit). Alas, Disney wasn't as smart as Warner Bros and has said that this lawsuit has no merit and tries to blame Scarlett for being insensitve about COVID-19 reality. That's playing dirty.
Though Black Widow opened well (for the pandemic era) it quickly dropped off. It's likely to become the second worst performer in MCU's history. The previous lowest grossers were The Incredible Hulk ($264 million) and Captain America The First Avenger ($370 million) both a decade ago long before Marvel had perfected their formula and half a billion globally was not just a game-changing sensation (2008's Iron Man got there but didn't do much more) but on the low end of the typical performance.
The MCU Box Office Rank (Domestic/Global)
* denotes movies Scarlett is in so it's not like she hasn't been working for the $
Disney is the Hulk in this equation picking on a much smaller creature.
- * Avengers Endgame (2019) $858/2.7 billion
- * Avengers: Infinity War (2018) $700/2 billion
- * Avengers (2012) $623/1.5 billion
- * Age of Ultron (2015) $459/1.4 billion
- Black Panther (2018) $700/1.3 billion
- Iron Man 3 (2013) $409/1.2 billion
- * Captain America: Civil War (2016) $408/1.1 billion
- Spider-Man Far From Home (2019) $390/1.1 billion
- Captain Marvel (2019) $427/1.1 billion
- Spider-Man Homecoming (2017) $334/880
- Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017) $389/863
- Thor: Ragnarok (2017) $315/853
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) $333/773
- * Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) $259/714
- Doctor Strange (2016) $233/677
- Thor: The Dark World (2013) $206/644
- * Iron Man 2 (2010) $312/623
- Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) $217/622
- Iron Man (2008) $319/585
- Ant-Man (2015) $180/519
- Thor (2011) $181/449
- Captain America The First Avenger (2011) $176/370
- 🔺 * Black Widow (2021) $135/318
- The Incredible Hulk (2009) $135/264
We hope Scarlett lawyered up well.
— Liam Miller (@liammiller87) July 29, 2021
She deserves the money and she's setting an important precedent here that will help other filmmakers. If massive billion dollar corporations can do whatever they want and reneg on contracts with their most valuable players, what's to stop them from doing it all over the place and to people without the means to fight back? Depressingly many on the internet are calling her "greedy" and suggesting that the movie wouldn't have done well even if the pandemic hadn't been on. Both arguments are silly since the only greed is Disney's for not meeting to regenotiate and assuming that they could just keep all the Disney+ money for themselves (since that wasn't in the original contract). Plus, there's no way that Black Widow wouldn't have performed at least in the average low Marvel range of say $500 million. She's a more popular character than Ant-Man after all. What's more Captain Marvel (and non-Marvel film Wonder Woman) both very recently proved that the argument that women couldn't lead superhero pictures to financial success was just corporate anxiety combined with unimaginative sexism.
The real mystery is why Disney didn't meet about regenotiating her salary once they decided to put Black Widow on Disney Plus.