Don’t post leaked Marvel content on the internet: That is the message that Disney seems to want to send as it has started a quest to discover who posted many pages of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to Reddit this past January. On March 10, Marvel requested a federal court issue a subpoena for information about the user who posted the content to the subreddit r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers about a month before the movie landed.
According to Variety, the document is requesting “all Identifying Information for the user ‘u/MSSmods’”and “any other user(s) responsible for posting, editing, and/or maintaining the content” that was available between January 15 and February 15. Evidently, u/MSSmods put up a 63-page transcript of dialogue from the film that has since been taken down but was real enough to have Marvel take legal action about it. We can’t look at the transcript right now, but given that it was one, the going theory is that the text was possibly going to be used for subtitles. Marvel is furthermore requesting similar information from Google amid a DMCA subpoena after the transcript was also posted to Google Docs, which seems like an even sketchier request given that’s basically a private file — though, if shared publicly, it becomes a public leak.
Reddit released a statement saying, “Reddit is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We have rigorous processes in place to assess legal requests and object when appropriate.”
While Marvel is obviously trying to stomp out some sort of leak here between Reddit and Google, the actual ramifications for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania seem pretty minimal. The leaked transcription didn’t become some sort of viral sensation, and this isn’t like when the entirety of X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked online. No, Quantumania‘s problems mostly stem from poor reviews that could finally hint at a downturn of the Marvel machine, though its box office was right in line with that of the other Ant-Man films. This leak is just a legal blip for Marvel and probably some Reddit user’s worst nightmare.
