Disney’s Marvel is trying to track down the identity of the person (or people) who allegedly released a 63-page transcript of dialogue from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” online — one month before the film’s theatrical premiere.
A request filed Friday (March 10) on behalf of Marvel in federal district court in California asked the court to issue a subpoena to compel Reddit to identify the person or group responsible for sharing dialogue from “Quantumania” to the r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers subreddit “on or about” Jan. 20, 2023. The film, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Jonathan Majors, opened wide in the U.S. on Feb. 17.
Marvel requested “all Identifying Information for the user ‘u/MSSmods’” as well as that of “any other user(s) responsible for posting, editing, and/or maintaining the content” that was available on the subreddit (but is no longer) for the period from Jan. 15-Feb. 15. The Marvel subpoena request was filed pursuant to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Asked for comment, a Reddit spokesperson declined to say if the company intended to comply with the information requested by Marvel. “Reddit is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We have rigorous processes in place to assess legal requests and object when appropriate,” the rep said.
Marvel also filed a DMCA subpoena requesting similar info from Google, after someone allegedly shared the document to Google Docs. Reps for Marvel and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Marvel had previously issued DMCA takedown requests to Reddit and Google seeking to remove the copyright-infringing material.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” has been one of the worst-reviewed Marvel movies to date. The film grossed $198 million domestically through its fourth weekend of release, outpacing the original “Ant-Man” ($180 million) and just trailing 2018 sequel “Ant-Man and the Wasp” ($216 million).
The dialogue from the movie that had been leaked online was edited and/or displayed in a Portuguese web interface, per piracy news site TorrentFreak, which previously reported on the Marvel legal filings. The report also cited evidence of the “likelihood that the text was intended for use in subtitles.”
