The Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, who is extremely wealthy by average income standards, has sued the Disney group.
She does not want money from the income that this company made with the film "Black Widow", in which Johansson plays the title superhero.
It is more curious: Johansson demands her share of a sum that the company does not voluntarily collect by willfully reducing the number of cinema tickets sold by starting the streaming evaluation directly, i.e. much too close to the start of the rental period.
Disney is apparently more important than the short-term ticket balance of the medium to long-term control of the exploitation channels of the "content" offers it produces. It's a bit like the Chinese Communist Party when they put pressure on the listing of Chinese companies like Alibaba because, socialistically, they mean more than face value to power over Chinese economic affairs. At China the capitalist complains about it, at Disney not.
In the comics she's taken from, Black Widow, whose net worth in the dispute between Johansson and Disney, is not from the People's Republic of China, but from the Soviet Union.
But the question of power (should I do what I am sent to do, or do I oppose the plans from above?), Just like her actress now, poses no differently than an insubordinate Chinese billionaire - with better precedent, however.
Respect for the creative
The film business may now repeat what a top earner in the comic business achieved decades ago, the enforcement of respect for overreached creative people. Not an actress, but a comic artist named Neal Adams, then a superstar of the industry, put through the public shame of the Marvel company and the competition of Warner, owner of the comic book publisher DC, the at least symbolic partial correction of the shabby treatment that these companies give the inventors of characters like Captain America and Superman, people named Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who had been underpaid and cheated for decades.
The heroic team in which Black Widow first appeared on screen is called "Avengers"; an older German translation of the source material calls them "the glorious avengers". Perhaps the businessmen in the culture industry should read more carefully the texts whose exploitation is their capital.