The ongoing legal battle between Black Widow star, Scarlett Johanson, and The Walt Disney Company continues to heat up as now Disney’s longtime attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, is calling the lawsuit a “highly orchestrated PR campaign”.
Disney attorney Daniel Petrocelli spoke with Variety regarding the lawsuit, saying that it is a “highly orchestrated PR campaign”. According to Variety, Petrocelli said that “the demands in Johansson’s litigation are far out of the bounds of the actor’s contract with the studio”.
In fact, he distinguished the lawsuit as an attempt to “force Disney to write a check that backfired”
“It is obvious that this is a highly orchestrated PR campaign to achieve an outcome that is not obtainable in the lawsuit,” Petrocelli told Variety. “No amount of public pressure can change or obscure the explicit contractual commitments. The written contract is clear as a bell.”
The legal battle has been ongoing ever since the end of July, just days after Black Widow was officially released.
Throughout the pandemic, Disney has been using another movie outlet called Premier Access, which charges Disney+ subscribers an additional fee to purchase the film directly through the streaming service. This allows fans who are not comfortable going out to the movie theaters during the ongoing pandemic, to still enjoy the latest Disney movie releases, right from the comfort of their own home while Disney still makes a profit.
Premier Access costs $29.99 per film, on top of a Disney+ subscription. Each film available on Premier Access requires a one-time purchase to own it on the streaming service forever. The live-action Mulan film was the first film to do use Premier Access, in which several other movies followed including the latest Marvel movie, Black Widow, which stars Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow.
This latest model, according to Johansson and her team, caused Disney to break a term in their contract with the actress, which, in turn, has caused her a large financial loss from the film. This is the reason why Johansson moved forward with suing Disney. For more information on the ongoing lawsuit, visit our website here.
In Marvel Studios’ action-packed spy thriller “Black Widow,” Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down [Taskmaster and Dreykov (Ray Winstone)], Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.
Scarlett Johansson reprises her role as Natasha/Black Widow, Florence Pugh stars as Yelena, David Harbour portrays Alexei/The Red Guardian, and Rachel Weisz is Melina. “Black Widow” — the first film in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — is directed by Cate Shortland and produced by Kevin Feige.
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