It’s the lawsuit heard around the entertainment world. Scarlet Johansson’s legal and PR battle with Disney over her Black Widow (2021) earnings is unusually public and hostile for a relationship between an actor and a studio who’ve done nine movies together. The star claims Disney breached her contract by releasing Black Widow on Disney+ at the same time as its theatrical run, thereby depriving her of millions in bonuses tied to box office milestones.
Disney’s reply to the suit was personal and viscous. The corporation’s portrait of her as a “callous” woman seems tailored to incite misogyny as a distraction from the apparent hypocrisy of suggesting she needn’t get paid during a pandemic even though Disney’s stock price is on a healthy up-and-up. The emotional intensity surrounding this lawsuit signals a bigger power struggle that’s gearing up between stars and studios, as both anxiously eye a future where blockbusters increasingly live on streaming platforms.
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It’s the lawsuit heard around the entertainment world. Scarlet Johansson’s legal and PR battle with Disney over her Black Widow earnings is unusually public and hostile for a relationship between an actor and a studio who’ve done nine movies together.
The star claims Disney breached her contract by releasing Black Widow on Disney+ at the same time as its theatrical run, thereby depriving her of (she claims) up to $50 million in bonuses tied to box office milestones. Disney’s reply to the suit was personal and kind of vicious. They wrote, “The lawsuit is especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard
for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
T.J. Holmes: “What we have here is essentially a pandemic created labor dispute.” - Good Morning America (2021)
For all of us watching and reading about this at home, it may feel hard to root for either party in this fight. Does Scarjo need another $50 million dollars? Of course not, and Disney’s statement
made sure we all knew she’s already been paid 20 million — but that figure or her overall wealth aren’t really relevant if Disney committed to more in the contract. The corporation’s portrait of her as a “callous” woman also seems tailored to incite misogyny as a distraction from
the apparent hypocrisy of suggesting she needn’t get paid during a pandemic even though their stock price is on a healthy up-and-up. The emotional intensity surrounding this lawsuit signals a bigger power struggle that’s gearing up between stars and studios, as both anxiously eye a future where blockbusters increasingly live on streaming platforms.
Is this a feminism issue?
To some, there’s also hypocrisy on Johansson’s side: framing suing Disney as a “girl power” move is questionable given the actor’s history of choices that are tone-deaf, if not indifferent
to the well-being of other women or minorities. Johansson has been active in movements like Time’s Up and criticized some men, but she’s also defended Woody Allen and said she “would work with him anytime,” despite the credible allegations that he abused Dylan Farrow. She also drew criticism for playing the lead (originally Japanese) character in 2017’s white-washed Ghost in the Shell, and initially accepting a role playing a trans man in 2018’s Rub & Tug.
On the other hand, all this is exactly what Disney wants us to be thinking about. Framing this as the latest in her series of unrelatable controversies is part of the company’s calculated strategy to make her action sound frivolous and greedy.
Meanwhile, in addition to Johansson’s history of cringe-y comments, her gender undoubtedly shapes the way that Disney feels they can come after her. Revealing the $20 million figure to the public was an attempt to — as her agent, Bryan Lourd, puts it — “weaponize her success
as an artist and businesswoman.” It is hard to imagine them doing this to a male star, even though some of them have earned much more for Marvel movies — with Robert Downey Jr reportedly earning $75 million from Avengers Endgame.
Disney’s language accusing “callous” Scarjo of not caring about the suffering caused by the pandemic is emotionally loaded, playing into social assumptions that it’s unnatural for a woman
specifically to be uncaring. Arguing that Johansson shouldn’t profit during a pandemic is not very compelling when you look at how Disney’s fortunes rose over 2020 and 2021, its stock price rising above its pre-pandemic level, and Disney+ subscriptions going from 26.5 million subscribers at the end of March 2020 to 103.6 million subscribers at the end of April 2021. Fans have already called out this rhetoric as totally “hypocritical” from a company that’s still operating
its theme parks with few restrictions in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.
According to feminist groups Women in Film, ReFrame and Time’s Up, Disney’s statement, “attempts to characterize Johansson as insensitive or selfish for defending her contractual
business rights.”
Johansson tops many publications’ lists of highest-paid actresses for multiple years, but the key word is “actress”: In 2019 she still took home over 30 million less than the highest-paid actor that year, Dwayne Johnson, and at least two other MCU actors earned more. Meanwhile, though misogyny is one of their tactics, Disney’s motives for hitting back at Johansson — and why this matters so much to them — are not really about her being a woman, but more about the emerging struggle over how movie stars fit into (and earn in) a streaming-centric future.
Movie Star Paychecks in the Streaming Future
Johansson’s lawsuit argues that the streaming release of Black Widow earned value for Disney+ which isn’t quantified in the movie’s box office figures. Quote, “Why would Disney forgo
hundreds of millions of dollars in box office receipts by releasing the picture in theatres at a time when it knew the theatrical market was ‘weak,’ ... Disney saw the opportunity to promote its flagship subscription service using the Picture and Ms. Johansson, thereby attracting new paying monthly subscribers, retaining existing ones, and establishing Disney+ as a must-have service in an increasingly competitive marketplace.”
But the contracts of today’s movie stars are built around box office returns. This is where this lawsuit becomes so important to Disney — it’s outcome sets a precedent for how other actors will negotiate their contractual rights as more and more big releases are created for streaming platforms. It’s rumored that other actors like Emma Stone and Emily Blunt are considering similar lawsuits for their roles in Cruella and Jungle Cruise, respectively, and Blunt and John Krasinski are reported to have sought compensation from Paramount for shortening the theatrical window for A Quiet Place 2.
Complicating this picture is that (unlike Warner Brothers, which released its 2021 movies for free with an HBO max subscription and had to offer extra payments to some actors as a result) Disney+ did charge an on-demand fee for Black Widow — a fact that entertainment attorney
John Sloss told the LA Times weakens Johansson’s case, since those sales were likely factored into the formula for her compensation.
As the whole media landscape shifts, the leverage of the movie star is declining; franchises and earnings today are driven by intellectual property more than star power. This trend can be overstated — after all, every Marvel movie is packed with stars who come with hefty price tags — yet, a number of those names were created or launched into a much higher stratosphere
of stardom by MCU movies. Since her Marvel work is now done, Johansson is in a unique position to bring this lawsuit, while Black Widow is also the first Marvel movie to come out since the pandemic began.
The Problem with Black Widow
This whole mess is a strangely fitting end to the trajectory of Black Widow, a character who was created and defined by men, and sometimes let down by the MCU. As the only leading female character in the MCU’s early movies, she was introduced in Iron Man 2 as a pretty objectified version of the “sexy spy” archetype. The actor later reflected, “the character is so sexualised…[She is] really talked about like she’s a piece of something, like a possession or a thing [...] like a piece of ass, really.”
The franchise struggled with her character in notorious missteps like the highly sexualized violence in the interrogation scene in Avengers, having her call herself a “monster” because she had been sterilized and generally making her feel like an unrealistically sexy “cool girl” type.
Despite some progress in her character’s evolution over her nine films, Natasha’s story still ultimately ended with her dying for a male character — and happy to do so because he had a family while (as we know) she couldn’t have kids. When Black Widow did at last get her standalone movie, it came with the limitations of being the prequel for a dead character, making its impact on the overall MCU feel a little slight.
Interestingly, the Black Widow movie attempts to be a take on feminist empowerment The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg writes that “Black Widow” is about how men molded Natasha and her “sister,” Yelena Belova into “avatars of hyperfemininity employed to hypermasculine ends… a male-defined vision of female superheroism.”
Scarlet Johansson: “It would have been a missed opportunity if this film didn’t reflect… you know what’s going on in the zeitgeist. That is female empowerment.” - Extra
Rosenberg points out that, “There’s an irony to this franchise raising questions about what it means for men to dictate what female strength and empowerment look like… because Black Widow is the invention of three men,” and even if the movie is directed by a woman (Cate Shortland), the MCU is headed by Kevin Feige.
She also points out the long history of men defining female strength on screen, and the fact that even Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” feminism and Sophia Amoruso’s “Girlboss” version are still based largely on women partaking in a male idea of success. Arguably, this is the problem with Johansson’s own feminism — it’s a self-interested “Lean in” Girlboss type, defined by her trying to compete for a spot in a male-defined world.
Still, we’re all shaped and limited by our experiences and the environments we came up in, and Black Widow was that lone female character carrying the pressure of transitioning the MCU toward a more “female” future.
But the truth of this story is that it’s actually not about ScarJo. Disney’s tactics here echo larger trends to make the human presence and creator’s agency ever less important to moviemaking. As Martin Scorsese-inspired debates around the evils of “content” reveal, when you remove the feeling that the artist matters to the art, everything risks becoming one long advertisement for the brand.
Sources:
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