Yesterday, news broke that Scarlett Johansson was suing Disney over their decision to release ‘Black Widow’ day-and-date on Disney+ PVOD as well as in cinemas. The argument is that her fee included a cut of the revenue from the theatrical release and that this was cut by the decision to allow the movie to be made available on streaming.
Scarlett’s argument certainly seems to hold water. The movie opened with an $80m domestic opening in the U.S., a record in these COVID times. However, this was tempered by Disney making $60m from streaming. Since then, both the cinema take and the streaming take have fallen off a cliff. Let’s not play around here, Scarlett still received $20m for the movie but undoubtedly, she still lost a LOT of money.
Is Scarlett just being greedy here? Well, to be honest, I’m not convinced she is, and even if she were, I don’t think it plays any part of this story.
The simple fact is that when she signed her contract, it was at a time when COVID wasn’t even a “thing”. Also, it is extremely common for big-name actors in movies to negotiate a portion of their salary for the movie to come from the box office takings. The real kicker though is that the contract was based upon there being an exclusive theatrical window for the movie release. This is where I think, ultimately, Scarlett will win and Disney could see the flood-gates open to similar suits.
Let’s take a look at why day-and-date release on streaming really hurts the box office takings.
Firstly, look at a conventional cinema run:
- The movie opens in theatres. Individuals buy individual tickets to see the movie. i.e. revenue is per-person
- If an individual wants to see the movie again through it’s theatrical run, then they pay again to see it
- Following the exclusive theatrical run, things open up to streaming. Typically, this takes two forms:
- Customers can ‘buy’ the movie for a premium price (e.g. $30)
- Customers can ‘rent’ the movie (e.g. $4.99 for 24hrs)
- Moving on from here, you then have the Blu-Ray/DVD release
- Finally, you have the streaming service subscribers have access to the movie as part of their subscription
By releasing on streaming the same day as the cinema, you open the doors to:
- Reduced revenue from the cinema release because people watch the movie at home
- There is no 1:1 mapping between billing for individuals vs viewing on streaming. You could have a house full of people as a watch-party and pay once. To a degree, that’s why the PVOD cost for BW was $30 based on there being a few in the house watching it. But for a big, MCU movie, watch-parties were a thing
- Even worse, if an individual wants to see the movie again, or worse, have ANOTHER watch party with 20 DIFFERENT people, then box office revenue is reduced even more
- It is simply a fact that it’s not rocket-science to capture the output from a streaming device. Of course it would be stupid to go into detail on that. But it’s just not. As such, it’s just facilitating piracy with the end result being superb quality. That is just reducing the studio income further
The bottom line here is that the decision Disney made absolutely DID have a fundamental impact on Scarlett Johansson’s income and I’m quite sure that they will be held to account over it.
What has seriously impressed me is that it’s only now, 3-4 weeks after the initial release, that we’re hearing about this. Through the release of the movie, Scarlett maintained all her publicity, she never talked the movie down, everything asked of her was fulfilled. Of course it’s possible she just wanted to see how the box office played out before making a final decision but that is pure speculation.
Disney then putting out a comment that is simply there to try to drive emotion by stating what her basic income was plus how she was ‘ignoring the impact of COVID’ absolutely holds no weight. The contract was put together before COVID and at the point where they wanted to release BW on Disney+, they had plenty of opportunity to renegotiate the contract.
I fear this will be an expensive mistake for Disney to have made.
