Marvel Files Court Documents To Force Reddit To Expose Who Leaked QUANTUMANIA Script

Last month, Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania hit theaters to mixed reviews from fans and critics. But however you felt about the movie, it was a pivotal storyline in the making of the upcoming movies. The film’s villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Major) will continue to cause ripples in the multiverse and will be the next big villain our MCU villains face.

So it was quite frustrating for the famous secret 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 script in full, but subtitles for a movie are all the lines and enough context to understand how the story unfolds.

According to torrentfreak, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena requests on Friday to force Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. A named user account is shared among the subreddit’s moderator team. Court documents indicate the plan is to force Reddit to expose them all. As Reddit fights to protect the identities of users who have merely participated in piracy-related discussions, two new cases filed last Friday could also prove controversial.

The report goes on to say:

On Friday at the United States District for the Northern District of California, Marvel Studios filed a statement supporting a DMCA subpoena request filed with Google. Matthew Slatoff, Marvel’s vice president, global security and content protection, advised the court that his responsibilities include monitoring and resolving the infringement of MVL Film Finance’s rights.

According to Slatoff’s statement, a Disney anti-piracy analyst filed a copyright infringement notice with Google on Jan. 21 after discovering that content from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had been uploaded to systems operated by Google, without the authorization from MVL. The takedown notice, sent via Google’s web form, contained a request from Google and a response from the rights owner.

Identify and describe the copyrighted work: Leaked unreleased screenplay of the new Disney film Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Marvel has provided a URL docs.google.com/document/ as the location for the allegedly infringing content. The content no longer exists at that location.

On January 23, Disney’s analyst received confirmation that while the takedown notice had been received from Google, the company was unable to remove any content. Sometime during the previous couple of days the file had already been removed, leaving Google with nothing to do.

Continues:

The document in question reveals some interesting details. It is 63 pages long, and in an introduction written by an unidentified person, the “script” text is attributed to screenwriter Jeff Loveness and described as “translated dialogue”.

The script has been edited and/or rendered in a Portuguese web interface, but since both Portugal and Brazil are mentioned in the source, neither can be excluded or excluded. Other evidence points to the likelihood that the text was intended for use in subtitles. Also interesting is a reference to the date.

The Reddit thread mentioned in the document is still online. It provides a number of spoilers but carries no text from the leak.

The “leaked” document Marvel is interested in mentions the Reddit thread above as being two months old at the time the document was written or edited. Both DMCA subpoena applications request information about Google and Reddit users and their alleged activities between January 15 and February 15, 2023.

The time frame seems relevant; around January 20 it was reported that the film’s entire storyline had been leaked online.

While this ties back to the new Reddit thread, the old Reddit thread hints at a much earlier plot leak, circa October 2022. Substantial leaks go back even further, but nothing on the scale of an entire script.

Marvel now wants Reddit to deliver “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 perhaps all of the subreddit’s moderators have used it at some point.

Not ideal when a person has posted the controversial thread, but the requested information includes “any information provided when an infringing user established their Reddit account, including name(s), address(es), phone number(s), email address (es); (b) any IP address used by that user; and (c) your account number(s).

It’s definitely a bad situation. While the commenters on the original post seemed impressed with the conquest of the leak, it doesn’t seem like it was worth it. I bet whoever is behind this is regretting his decision right now. But what did they expect to happen?

The Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit has since shut down. This is the message that was posted just before the closing:

“So, I tried to come up with a clever title, but I really couldn’t find one. I just wanted to take the time to go in and tell a little story. This subreddit was created by ‘someone’ because they hated going to the Marvel Studios subreddit. They wanted to know about things that were coming out, leaks, spoilers, etc… but they had such a strong policy that you couldn’t talk about anything without it being removed, message.(That was then, I have no idea if that’s the case now .)”

“Eventually, a reliable/responsible help for a page that was never meant to be serious. It’s grown and grown…now it’s so big that people in the MCU know it. Sadly, that means that even disney knows about it. The mouse always wins… a lesson i learned from south park. This subreddit will likely be removed soon, as i’m sure many of you have seen the news/articles/etc. time for that…and then there will be no more mods, the subreddit will essentially run itself. If anyone wants to escalate and take over the subreddit…including all legal ramifications (potentially), please message this account.”

So that’s it.