by Last month, Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania released in theaters to mixed reviews from fans and critics. But however you felt about the film, it was a pivotal story in setting up the films to come. The film’s villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) will continue to make waves in the multiverse and will be the next big bad that our MCU villains will face.
So it was quite disappointing for the famously secretive film studio when some Reddit users posted a copy of the film’s subtitles on the site a month before the film’s release. It wasn’t the full script, but subtitles for a movie are all the lines and enough context to understand how the story unfolds.
According to torrentfreak, last Friday a Marvel Studios subsidiary filed DMCA subpoenas to compel Reddit and Google to reveal the hackers. A named user account is shared among the subreddit’s moderator group. Court documents show the plan is to force Reddit to reveal everything. As Reddit struggles to protect the identities of users who merely participated in hacking-related discussions, two new cases filed last Friday may also prove controversial.
The report goes on to say:
Last Friday, in the United States District for the Northern District of California, Marvel Studios filed a statement in support of a DMCA subpoena petition targeting Google. Matthew Slatoff, Marvel’s Vice President, Global Security & Content Protection, informed the Court that his responsibilities include monitoring and addressing the infringement of MVL Film Finance’s rights.
According to Slatoff’s statement, on Jan. 21, a Disney anti-piracy analyst filed a copyright infringement notice with Google after discovering that content from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had been uploaded to systems operated by Google without the authorization of MVL. The takedown notice, submitted via Google’s web form, contained a message from Google and a response from the rights holder.
Identify and describe the copyrighted work: Unreleased script of the new Disney movie Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Marvel provided a URL docs.google.com/document/ as the location for the allegedly infringing content. Content no longer exists at this location.
On January 23, the Disney analyst received confirmation that while the takedown notice had been received by Google, the company was unable to remove any content. Sometime during the previous two days the file had already been removed, leaving Google with nothing to do.
Continues:
The document in question reveals some interesting details. It’s 63 pages long, and in an introduction written by an unknown person, the text of the “screenplay” is attributed to screenwriter Jeff Loveness and described as “translated dialogue”.
The script was edited and/or displayed on a Portuguese web interface, but since both Portugal and Brazil are listed as the source, neither can be banned or blocked. Other evidence points to the possibility that the text was intended for use in subtitles. A date reference is also interesting.
The Reddit thread referenced in the document is still online. It provides a number of spoilers but does not carry any text from the leak.
The “leaked” document that Marvel is interested in states that the Reddit thread above was two months old at the time the document was written or edited. Both DMCA subpoenas seek information about Google and Reddit users and their alleged activities from January 15 to February 15, 2023.
The timing seems relevant. around January 20 it was reported that the entire plot of the film had been leaked online.
While this links to the newer Reddit thread, the older Reddit thread suggests a much earlier plot leak, around October 2022. Major plot leaks date back even further than that, but nothing on the scale of an entire script.
Marvel now wants Reddit to hand over “All identifying information for user “u/MSSmods,” which throws another unpredictable element into the mix.
/u/MSSMods was created in March 2021 and declared as a shared account, which means that at least one, or some, or maybe all of the subreddit’s moderators have used it at some point.
This isn’t ideal when a person posted the controversial thread, but the information requested includes “any information provided when an Offending User created their Reddit account, including names, address, phone numbers, email address es?” ( b) any IP addresses used by that user; and (c) account number(s).’
It’s definitely a bad situation. While commenters on the original post seemed impressed by the leak’s conquest, it doesn’t seem to have been worth it. I bet whoever is behind this is regretting their decision right now. But what did they expect to happen?
The Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit has since been shut down. This is the message posted shortly before it closed:
“Well, I tried to come up with a clever title, but I really couldn’t think of one. I just wanted to take some time and tell a little story. This subreddit was created by ‘someone’ because they hated going to the Marvel Studios subreddit. They wanted to find out about the things that were coming out, leaks, spoilers, etc… but they had such a strong policy that you couldn’t talk about anything without being removed, banned or sent a message. (That was then, I have no idea if so now.)”
“Finally some credible/responsible help for a page that was never meant to be anything serious. It’s grown and grown…now it’s grown so much that people from the MCU know about it. Unfortunately, that means Disney knows about it too. mouse always wins…a lesson I learned from South Park.This subreddit will probably be taken down soon as I’m sure many of you have seen the news/articles/etc..ain’t got time for that… and so there will be no more modifications, the subreddit will essentially run on its own. If anyone wants to step up and take over the subreddit…including all the legal ramifications (potentially), please message this account.”
Well, here it is.
