Marvel Studios, the company behind some of the biggest blockbusters of the last decade, are apparently cheap. According to new reports, while the studio pays its actors well, they undercut other talent. Vulture is reporting that the studio underpays and overworks visual effects companies. According to one VFX artist, they’ve had coworkers break down and cry next to them because of the amount of hours they were working. “I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week.”
When a movie studio is looking for a visual effects studio, they typically take bids. A lot of times studios will take the lower bids to save money, but the staff still needs to get paid for their time. What ends up happening is that the studio can only pay for one to two people working on the project. Sometimes that work could be enough for ten people. When the budget doesn’t allow that many people, two end up doing the job of ten. This isn’t exclusive to Marvel though, every studio does it. What happens if it’s just not possible to meet the deadline?
For a lot of studios, the studio can push back and say what isn’t possible and negotiate to meet the deadline. When it comes to Marvel Studios, they are releasing a new movie or show every few months now, so they have a lot of work for these companies. With the work comes the amount of pushback that they can do. If the VFX studio can’t deliver what they find acceptable, they can blacklist them. A studio being blacklisted from Marvel Studios means that they are losing out on a lot of potential revenue.
Comic Creators
Visual Effects Studios aren’t the only ones being underpaid. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Marvel Studios isn’t paying the creators of these characters. These characters make the studio millions of dollars every year. The creators of the characters are only getting paid a fraction of that and sometimes they aren’t even being paid that full amount. In 2021, Yelena Belova creators were supposed to be paid $25,000 for her appearance in Black Widow. They were paid $5,000. When Yelena appeared in the Hawkeye series, they were supposed to be paid $1,000 for each episode she appeared in. The creators were only paid $300 each.
Is It Actually Marvel?
Marvel Studios undercut Scarlet Johansson’s box office bonus when they released Black Widow on Disney+ and in theaters at the same time. Johansson sued Marvel Studios and Disney in 2021, eventually settling the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money. The head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, was apparently upset at Disney’s plan to put the movie on Disney+. He apparently wanted to side with Johansson, but couldn’t do so as the company head.
Disney also has a history of not paying artists in their other franchises. In 2020, Alan Dean Foster posted an open letter saying he hadn’t received any royalty payments for his Star Wars novels since Star Wars was bought by Disney. Foster then stopped receiving royalties for his Alien novels after they bought Fox. Foster has since been paid, but there are other artists that haven’t been.
Disney released a statement last year saying “We are carefully reviewing whether any royalty payments may have been missed as a result of acquisition integration and will take appropriate remedial steps if that is the case”. Since then the problems have persisted. Artist’s agents have said that Marvel Entertainment is the most cooperative of Disney’s subsidiaries when it comes to resolving payments. Even though that is the case, payments can still be lower than anticipated. They can also take more than a year to be received.
