Marvel Files Court Documents to Compel Reddit to Expose Who Leaked QUANTUMANIA Script

Last month, Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hit theaters to mixed reviews from fans and critics alike. But however you felt about the film, it was a pivotal storyline in setting up the upcoming films. The movie’s villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) will go on to cause ripples in the multiverse, and will be the next big bad our MCU villains will take on.

So it was pretty frustrating to the famously secretive movie 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 the subtitles for a movie are all the lines, and enough context to figure out how the story plays out.

According to the site torrentfreak, last Friday, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena applications to compel Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. One 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 simply participated in piracy-related discussions, two new cases filed last Friday may also prove controversial.

The report goes on to say:

Last Friday at the United States District for the Northern District of California, Marvel Studios’ submitted a declaration in support of a DMCA subpoena application targeting Google. Matthew Slatoff, Marvel’s Vice President, Global Security & Content Protection, informed the Court that his responsibilities include monitoring and addressing infringement of MVL Film Finance’s rights.

According to Slatoff’s declaration, on January 21, a Disney anti-piracy analyst submitted a copyright infringement notice to Google after discovering that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania content had been uploaded to systems operated by Google, without MVL’s authorization. The takedown notice, submitted via Google’s webform, contained a prompt from Google and a response from the rightsholder.

Identify and describe the copyrighted work: Unreleased leaked script of the new Disney movie Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Marvel supplied a docs.google.com/document/ URL 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 by Google, the company wasn’t able to take any content down. Sometime during the previous couple of days the file had already been removed, leaving Google with nothing to do.

It continues:

The document in question reveals a few interesting details. It’s 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 was edited and/or displayed in a Portuguese web interface, but since both Portugal and Brazil are mentioned in the source, neither can be ruled in or out. Other evidence points to the likelihood that the text was intended for use in subtitles. A date reference is also interesting.

The Reddit thread mentioned in the document is still online. It provides a number of spoilers but doesn’t carry any 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 seek information relating to Google and Reddit users and their alleged activities between January 15 to February 15, 2023.

The timeframe seems relevant; around January 20 it was reported that the entire plot of the movie had been leaked online.

While that ties in with the newer Reddit thread, the older Reddit thread suggests a much earlier plot leak, around October 2022. Substantial 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 the user ‘u/MSSmods’,” which throws another unpredictable element into the mix.

/u/MSSMods was created in March 2021 and declared as a shared account, meaning that at least one, or some, or perhaps all of the subreddit’s moderators have used it at some point.

That’s not ideal when one person posted the controversial thread, but the information requested includes “any information provided when an Infringing User established their Reddit account, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es); (b) any IP address(es) used by such user; and (c) account number(s).”

It’s a bad situation for sure. While commentors on the original post seemed impressed by the conquest of the leak, it doesn’t seem to have been worth it. I bet whoever is behind this is regretting their decision at this time. But what did they expect to happen?

Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit has since closed down. This is the message that was posted shorty before it closed:

"So, I tried to come up with a clever title, but I really couldn't think of one. I just wanted to take the time to drop 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 the stuff that was coming up, leaks, spoilers, etc...but they had such a strong policy that you couldn't talk about anything without it being removed, banned, or messaged. (That was back then, I have no idea if it is like that now.)"

"Eventually, some reliable/responsible help for a page that was never meant to be a serious thing. It grew and grew...now it has grown so large that people from the MCU know of it. Sadly, this means Disney also knows of it. The Mouse always wins...a lesson I learned from South Park. This subreddit will probably be taken down soon, as I am sure a lot of you have seen the news/articles/etc. Ain't nobody got time for that...and so there will no longer be any mods, the subreddit will operate on its own essentially. If someone wants to step up and takeover the subreddit...including all the legal ramifications (potentially), message this account."

So, there you have it.