“It is no secret that Disney is releasing movies like ‘Black Widow’ directly on Disney + to increase subscribers and thus boost the company’s share price, and that it is hiding behind covid-19 as a pretext to do so,” he said Johansson’s attorney, John Berlinski, in a statement to the AFP.
The film was originally due to premiere on the big screen last year, but was delayed multiple times due to the pandemic and finally premiered this month simultaneously in theaters and online on the Disney + channel.
Box office analysts cite the film’s streaming debut as a major factor for a mediocre release by Marvel standards, with a feature film that grossed just over $ 150 million in national theaters in three weeks.
“This surely will not be the last case in which Hollywood talent takes on Disney and makes it clear that, whatever the company wants, it has a legal obligation to fulfill its contracts,” Berlinski stressed.
A spokesperson for Disney, which owns the superhero movie powerhouse Marvel Studios, dismissed the lawsuit and said in a statement to the AFP that the company had not breached any contract and that “this lawsuit has no merit.”
“The lawsuit is especially sad and distressing because of its callous disregard for the horrible and lingering global effects of the covid-19 pandemic,” he added.
Like many Hollywood studios, Disney is increasingly prioritizing online streaming as a source of future revenue.
After the movie’s opening weekend, Disney issued a press release stating that “Black Widow” had made “more than $ 60 million” on Disney + alone., where it was available to subscribers at an additional cost of $ 30.
The lawsuit says that to protect his financial interests, Johansson “got a promise from Marvel that the film’s release would be a ‘theatrical release’“which she understood to mean that it would not be streamed online until a traditional” window “of time had passed.